“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
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking." by Paul Valéry?
Paul Valéry89
French poet, essayist, and philosopher 1871–1945Related 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
“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 must be as well written as prose.”
Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic
Letter to Harriet Monroe (January 1915)
“By definition, if prose is a river, poetry is a fountain.”
Michael Longley (1939) poet
'Poetry Ireland Review' Summer 1999
“Prose is private drama; poetry is corporate drama.”
Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …
Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 275
“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”
Mario Cuomo (1932–2015) American politician, Governor of New York
The New Republic (4 April 1985)
“Prose — it might be speculated — is discourse; poetry ellipsis.”
Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author
"'Soul at the White Heat': The Romance of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry," (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (1988)<!-- E.P. Dutton -->
Context: Prose — it might be speculated — is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider’s delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher
12 July 1827
Table Talk (1821–1834)