prose bewitched

Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea.

—Mina Loy, “Modern Poetry” (1925), Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry, 1800-1959, edited by Melissa Kwasny.

Editor’s headnote: “Loy—promoter of futurism, feminism, and modernism—did not publish much criticism. Yet this essay, which appeared in Charm, a women’s fashion magazine, conveys the sense of literary life in New York in the middle of a revolution [modernism].

sortit à cinq heures

Poet and critic Paul Valéry once remarked that he could never write a novel because he would have to write sentences like, ‘The Marquis left at five’.

[n.b.: I ran across this anecdote again recently in David Markson's Reader's Block. The above is a paraphrase of his entry.]

each word

In a poem, each word has to be right and contribute to the whole; in a story only every sentence. In a novel only every page.

—Alison Laurie, Real People (Penguin, 1978)

more fully in verse

Poetry. Perhaps I can express more fully in verse ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized opinions—hard as rock—which the vast body of men have vested interests in supporting.

—Thomas Hardy
[Notebook entry, 17 October 1896]

stands at the boundary

There is no doubt of the fact that “Cavafy stands at the boundary where poetry strips herself in order” (as I have said elsewhere) “to become prose.” No one has ever gone farther in this direction. He is the most anti-poetic (or a-poetic) poet I know.

—George Seferis, “Cavafy and Eliot—A Comparison,” On the Greek Style (Little Brown, 1966), trans. by Rex Warner.

vulgar error

An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony in the language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music, produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony and language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. The practice is indeed convenient and popular, and to be preferred, especially in such composition as includes much action: but every great poet must inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar versification. The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error. The distinction between philosophers and poets has been anticipated. Plato was essentially a poet—the truth and splendor of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive. He rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action, and he forebore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style. Cicero sought to imitate the cadence of his periods, but with little success. Lord Bacon was a poet. His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader’s mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy. All the authors of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth; but as their periods are harmonious and rhythmical, and contain in themselves the elements of verse; being the echo of the eternal music. Nor are those supreme poets, who have employed traditional forms of rhythm on account of the form and action of their subjects, less capable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things, than those who have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton (to confine ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very loftiest power.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” published posthumously in 1840 in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments.

prose errand

I have learned not to send a poem on a prose errand.

—John Ciardi, quoted in Edward Cefelli's introduction to Ciardi Himself: Fifteen Essays on Reading, Writing, and Teaching Poetry (U. of Arkansas Press, 1989)

step aside

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

—W. Somerset Maugham, Saturday Review, 20 July 1957.

bird poetics

As the third day came around, with these four lines [of a poem] as a body or at least part of a body, I had acquired a structure capable of development. These lines I carried with me in my head as I walked over to the main camp for breakfast. I carried them back on my return, and with pad and pencil sat down on our porch looking out on a more placid stretch of the river. Between the river and the porch lay a meadow over which many different birds were disporting. Soon I found myself absorbed in their enterprises, and in particular noted the hop-hop-hop of a certain small bird. That hop-hop-hop was another device of my devil, this time more tempter than censor, to divert me from my appointed project. I had begun to construct a fantasy that poetry is the language and rhythm for birds, and that prose is for cows. Indeed I may still write that poem. I’ll tuck away the line: Prose is for cows.

—Melville Cane, Making a Poem: An Inquiry into the Creative Process (Harvest Book, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1952, 1960)

dancing logos

But if it should turn out that music leads to language, rather than language to music, it helps us understand for the first time the otherwise baffling historical fact that poetry evolved before prose. Prose was at first known as pezos logos, literally 'pedestrian, or walking, logos', as opposed to the usual dancing logos of poetry. In fact early poetry was sung: so the evolution of literary skill progresses, if that is the correct word, from right-hemisphere music (words that are sung), to right-hemisphere language (the metaphorical language of poetry), to left hemisphere language (the referential language of prose)."

—Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale U. Press, 2009)

chopped into lines

Don't think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.

—Ezra Pound, "A Retrospect" (1918)

more primitive than prose

Poetry is more primitive than prose. It existed before prose and will exist afterward, it is not domesticated, it is wilder and more natural. It belongs out-doors, it has tides as nature has; while prose is a cultured interior thing, prose is of the house, where lamplight abolishes even the tides of day and night, and human caprice rules. The brain can make prose; the whole man, brain and nerves, muscles and entrails, organs of sense and of generation, makes poetry and responds to poetry.

—Robinson Jeffers, "Preface" (June 1922)

best word order

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, 'prose = words in their best order; — poetry = the best words in the best order'

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1 (1885), collected by Henry Nelson Coleridge.

advertencies of verse

All poetry is fragment: it is shaped by its breakages, at every turn. It is the very art of turnings, toward the white frame of the page, toward the unsung, toward the vacancy made visible, that wordlessness in which our words are couched. Its lines insistently defy their own medium by averting themselves from the space available, affording the absent its say, not only at the poem’s outset and end by at each line’s outset and end. Richard Howard’s deft maxim (“prose proceeds, verse reverses”) catches the shifts in directionality implicit in the advertencies of verse. It means to aim at (as its means are) the untoward.

A composed verse is a record of the meeting of the line and sentence, the advertent and the inadvertent: a succession of good turns done. The poem is not only a piece, like other pieces of art; it is a piece full of pieces.

Heather McHugh, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1993)

poetry or prose

What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose.

—Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (Random House, 1935, 209)

action anyplace

In poetry, the action can take place everywhere and nowhere: it does not matter whether the lonely wives of the fishermen live in Kalk Bay or Portugal or Maine. Prose, on the other hand, seems naggingly to demand a specific setting.

—J. M. Coetzee, Youth (Random House Group Limited, 2002, 62-63)