“The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.”

“Who needs poetry? All of us do. Poetry has always been the voice of the inner self, the carrier of revelations, dreams, and visions that often defy expression in ordinary prose.”

“Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not. And what is the vocabulary of which poetry absolutely is. It is a vocabulary based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun. Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry. So that is poetry really loving the name of anything and that is not prose.”

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

“Prose and poetry are different in construction. You can lie back and read prose, and you can read it fast. Poetry on the other hand, requires a different kind of attention and concentration … the effect it has on the ear and the imagination.”

“Progress … has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts for our tools.”

“Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry.”

“Let us look to beautiful poetry for the material of a beautiful prose.”

“The life insurance policies advertised on the radio with the line "You cannot be turned down for this coverage!" are actually saying, " For policies this small, it would cost us more to decide whom to turn down than simply to accept everybody-and make them pay through the nose."”

“Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn't.”