Prose Comparison Quotes

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.

Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of those things except with the added definition of intensified formal pressure.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

In prose, you have a lot more room for digression, for very meaty kinds of dialogues. In graphic novels, you're writing haiku-length dialogue. Your job is to be efficient, to get out of the way of the art.

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

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

Poetry isn't just different from prose, it's more important for the human species.

...in song the words tend to lose their significance, do often lose it, while at the other extreme, in current prose it is the musical value that tends to disappear - so that verse stands symmetrically, as it were, between song, on the one hand, and prose on the other - and is thus admirably and delicately balanced between the sensual and the intellectual power of language.

If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.

I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.

Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

I think poetry is a fabulous medium to encapsulate thoughts far more precisely than prose.

It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: - that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do, and awaken an apprehension of things we have never, and can never, know in the actuality.

It may be safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.... They both speak by and to the same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed may be said to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred, and almost identical, not necessarily differing even in degree; Poetry sheds no tears "such as Angels weep," but natural and human tears; she can boast of no celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both.

Maybe it is something to do with age, but I have become fonder of poetry than of prose.