Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
H. L. Mencken

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.
Christopher Fry

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

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

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.
Story Musgrave

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.
Jack Prelutsky

Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.
Robert Graves

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Ernest Hemingway

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
Walter Savage Landor

Prose talks and poetry sings.
Franz Grillparzer

Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.
George William Curtis

Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.
Franz Grillparzer

So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.
John Drinkwater

Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.
Eugenio Montale

Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.
Elia Kazan

That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.
Robert Creeley

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
George Orwell

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
Robert Morgan

The human brain can soften as a result of incessant listening to music with an intent to commit prose.
Donal Henahan

The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth.
George Saintsbury