“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.”

The Great Modern Poets, London, 2006

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Michael Schmidt (poet)10

American poet 1947

Yvor Winters (1900–1968) American poet and literary critic

The Audible Reading of Poetry (1951)

“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

“Exercises are like prose, whereas yoga is the poetry of movements. Once you understand the grammar of yoga; you can write your poetry of movements.”

Amit Ray (1960) Indian author

Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Lifestyle (2012) https://books.google.co.in/books?id=sBsG9V1oVdMC,

“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”

Mario Cuomo (1932–2015) American politician, Governor of New York

The New Republic (4 April 1985)

“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.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

"Poetry and Grammar"
Lectures in America (1935)

“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

“Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

“Prose is walking; poetry is flying”

Galway Kinnell (1927–2014) Poet

“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

“You can teach the writing of verse.. like prose.. an instrument.. and the recognition of true poetry. The rest, writers must teach them selves.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

Interview with J D McCarthy 'The Art of Poetry' no 35 Fall 1985

“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.”

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Michael Schmidt (poet)10

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