Ability Quote by Mary Karr

“Why can't prose be poetic?”

— Kevin Focke

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things…

— Seamus Heaney

Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.

— William Carlos Williams

Prose poetry is not set to a melody or music so there's something freeing about it.

— William Beckett

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

— Vita Sackville-West

It may be said that an education which does not succeed in making poetry a resource in the business of life as well as…

— John Dewey

Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.

— Walter Pater

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of…

— Walter Savage Landor

The fact that poetry is not of the slightest economic or political importance, that is has no attachment to any of the powers that…

— Graham Hough

Poets are not meant to be in competition.

— Howard Jacobson

Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. It insists on living its own life.

— Jean Cocteau