Defined Quote by William Carlos Williams

Poetry is prose, bent out of shape.

— J. Patrick Lewis

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

Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.

— Mary Oliver

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

— Joseph Brodsky

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

— Ezra Pound

Lately, I've been thinking about the difference between poetry and prose, and as I've experienced it, poetry is insistent. It allows for images and…

— Tracy K. Smith

Poetry is very playful with language. I think all poetry, at its heart, is playful. It's doing unusual and playful things with the language,…

— Pattiann Rogers

To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.

— Pattiann Rogers

A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state by means of words.

— Paul Verlaine

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

— Horace Walpole

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

— James Schuyler

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into…

— Michael Tippett