Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anestheti...c: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression--a kind of rudimentary theater--as do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there--that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable pre...sence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The definition of good prose is proper words in their proper places; of good verse, the most proper words in their proper places. ...The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach th...e white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.... The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Essay writing is perhaps ... the easiest for the author and requires little more than what is called a fluency of words and a viva...city of expression to avoid dullness; but without ... a real foundation of matter ... an essay writer is very apt, like Dogberry in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, to think that if he had the tediousness of a king, he would bestow it all upon his readers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poetry presents indivisible wholes of human consciousness, modified and ordered by the stringent requirements of form. Prose, aimi...ng at a definite and concrete goal, generally suppresses everything inessential to its purpose; poetry, existing only to exhibit itself as an aesthetic object, aims only at completeness and perfection of form.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Free verse leaves out the meter and makes up For the deficiency by church intoning.... Free verse, so called, is really cherished prose....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quite ...well developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »