“Sandburg is unreadable today only because of the way he wrote. His prose was bad poetry, like his poetry.”
'On American Movie Critics' (New York Times Book Review, June 4, 2006)
Essays and reviews
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Clive James151
Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator an… 1939–2019Related quotes
“Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry.”
David Hare (1947) British writer
Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare Guesses at Truth (London: Macmillan, ([1827-48] 1867) p. 143.
Misattributed
“Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
Sec. 92
The Gay Science (1882)
Subramanya Bharathi (1882–1921) Tamil poet
English translation originally from "Subramaniya Bharathi" at Tamilnation.org, also quoted in "Colliding worlds of tradition and revolution" in The Hindu (13 December 2009) http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/colliding-worlds-of-tradition-and-revolution/article662079.ece
“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
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher
Source: Attributed from posthumous publications, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), Ch. 43, November 11, 1947.
“Only in his poetry did he have the courage to love.”
Peter Weiss (1916–1982) Swedish-German playwright and author
Dante (written 1963, published 2003)
“Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.”
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher
“Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.”
John Wain (1925–1994) British writer
Talk on BBC Radio, 13 January 1976
Quoted in "The Penguin Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Quotations", J M & M J Cohen (1996) p. 389 ISBN 0-14-051165-2