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What good poetry and good prose have in common is vitality of rhythm .

— Michael Longley

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Poetry

More quotes by Michael Longley

By definition , if prose is a river, poetry is a fountain.

Poetry's only crucial attribute is rhythm. This is its heartbeat.This makes it memorable. If the rhythm falters , then the poem dies of heart failure.

If I knew where poems come from . I'd go there.

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Michael Longley (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.