“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
“Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.”
As quoted in Life of John Stuart Mill (1954) by M. St.J. Packe, Bk. I, Ch. II
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Jeremy Bentham30
British philosopher, jurist, and social reformer 1748–1832Related quotes
Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art
English Prose Style (1928)
Literary Quotes
“I'm a guy who tries to be successful in all that I do, and when you fall short, it hurts.”
LeBron James (1984) American basketball player
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) French writer, satirist and philosopher of enlightenment
The History of Oracles, and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests (1688)
Context: But why then did the Ancient Priestesses always answer in Verse?... To this Plutarch replies... That even the Ancient Priestesses did now and then speak in Prose. And besides this, in Old times all People were born Poets.... [T]hey had no sooner drank a little freely, but they made Verses; they had no sooner cast their eyes on a Handsom Woman, but they were all Poesy, and their very common discourse fell naturally into Feet and Rhime: So that their Feasts and their Courtships were the most delectable things in the World. But now this Poetick Genius has deserted Mankind: and tho' our passions be as ardent... yet Love at present creeps in humble prose.... Plutarch gives us another reason... that the Ancients wrote always in Verse, whether they treated of Religion, Morality, Natural Philosophy or Astrology. Orpheus and Hesiod, whom every body acknowledges for Poets, were Philosophers also: and Parmenides, Xenophanes, Empedocles, Eudoxus, and Thales... [the] Philosophers, were Poets too. It is very strange indeed that Poetry should be elder Brother to Prose... but it is very probable... precepts... were shap'd into measured lines, that they might be the more easily remembred: and therefore all their Laws and their rules of Morality were in Verse. By this we may see that Poetry had a much more serious beginning than is usually imagin'd, and that the Muses have of late days mightily deviated from their original Gravity.<!--pp. 207-209
“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
Henry Purcell, Edward Taylor (1843) in "Introduction" to, King Arthur: an opera in 5 acts, written by John Dryden. p. 3; Introduction; Cited in: James Anthony Froude, John Tulloch (1852), Fraser's Magazine, Vol. 45, p. 198
“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