Poetry Vs Prose Quotes

Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

Poetry has an indirect way of hinting at things. Poetry is feminine. Prose is masculine. Prose, the very structure of it, is logical; poetry is basically illogical. Prose has to be clear-cut; poetry has to be vague - that's its beauty, its quality. Prose simply says what it says; poetry says many things. Prose is needed in the day-to-day world, in the marketplace. But whenever something of the heart has to be said, prose is always found inadequate - one has to fall back to poetry.

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.

I don't work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their paces are also different.

I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry."

For me, what I am making in the novel is a place to live. When I first switched from poetry to novels, I was asked why, and the metaphor I came up with was about poems as rooms. You can make a room perfect, but then you have to shut the door and never go back, whereas a novel is like a house - it can never be perfect, but you can make a life in it.

Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.

My whole life has been a twenty years struggle between poetry and prose, or, if you like to call it so, Music and Law.

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.

There is no doubt that Michael Symmons Roberts is a very good poet - you don't win a Whitbread award and get shortlisted for a TS Eliot prize for nothing. Few poets, though, have ever been good novelists, and vice-versa.

Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.