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Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.

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Notes from Wikiquote

Quoted in "The Penguin Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Quotations", J M & M J Cohen (1996) p. 389 ISBN 0-14-051165-2

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Poetry

More quotes by John Wain

This book — amber-clear, cool and with a good head — deserves a thoughtful swig even from people who never drink.

As given in Simpson's Contemporary Quotations (1988)

How much of our literature, our political life, our friendships and love affairs, depend on being able to talk peacefully in a bar!

As given in Simpson's Contemporary Quotations (1988)

The lesson is that dying men must groan;
And poets groan in rhymes that please the ear.

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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: John Wain (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.