“Prose uses the medium of language whilst poetry serves language and explores it.”

— Michael Schmidt (poet)

The Great Modern Poets, London, 2006

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Prose uses the medium of language whilst poetry serves language and explores it." by Michael Schmidt (poet)?

Michael Schmidt (poet) 10

American poet 1947

Related quotes

“Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

The Critic as Artist (1891), Part I

“Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact … the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.”

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

Detail & Prosody for the Poem Patterson given to James Laughlin (1939), now at Houghton Library
General sources

“For literary purposes, the art of writing poetry can be simply defined as: A creative act using language as a medium refined to an art.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)

“The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.”

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American playwright and novelist

Writers at Work interview (1958)

“All words at every level of prose and poetry and all devices of language and speech derive their meaning from figure / ground relation.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

quoted in McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed by W. Terrence Gordon, 2010, p. 167
1980s

“I don’t think it’s a responsibility, but I certainly think it’s something poetry can do, and I think that poetry has a unique ability to do it because of its self-referential nature and its self-conscious nature. And I mean that in the sense that, in prose, we’re not often as conscious of the language and the operation of language itself. Our focus in on the content, on what is denotatively produced. In poetry we are trained, or at least readers of poetry are trained, to attend to or account for the structures of language as well as what that language conveys.”

Gregory Pardlo (1968) American writer

On if the poet has a responsibility in “‘The language is constructing our ideas more than we are deploying the language’: An interview with Gregory Pardlo” http://gulfcoastmag.org/reviews-and-interviews/art-and-reviews/an-interview-with-gregory-pardlo/ in Gulf Coast Magazine (2019 Jul 17)