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.]

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)

reading verse

It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.

—W. B. Yeats, introducing his poems in a 1932 recording, Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work, 1888-2006 (Shout! Factory, 2006)