A Quote by Edmund Clarence Stedman

The poet is a creator, not an iconoclast, and never will tamely endeavor to say in prose what can only be expressed in song.

Edmund Clarence Stedman

Quote Topics

Creator Endeavor Expressed Never Only Poet Prose Say Song Will

Quote Author

Edmund Clarence Stedman
American - Poet
October 8, 1833 - January 18, 1908

The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Music is mere tuning a song with words; to some degree you have a beautiful endeavor of cosigning God's blank checks and you're actually co-creating. You're certainly not the creator with the capital C, but you're embarking on an endeavor, you're using the building blocks that have been given to you by the author of time and space.

Jon Foreman

All the religions of the world say God is the creator. If he is really the creator, then the only way to meet him will be to become a creator in some measure.

Rajneesh

Of little use, the man you may suppose, Who says in verse what others say in prose; Yet let me show a poet's of some weight, And (though no soldier) useful to the state, What will a child learn sooner than a song? What better teach a foreigner the tongue? What's long or short, each accent where to place And speak in public with some sort of grace?

Alexander Pope

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

Samuel McChord Crothers

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes...

W. Somerset Maugham

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

W. Somerset Maugham

For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.

John Cheever

Calvinism is the consistent endeavor to acknowledge the Creator as the Lord, working all things after the counsel of His will.

J. I. Packer

It's important to immerse myself in one thing at a time to do it well, but I could never do one thing only. I will always be a poet and a singer, because I'm interested in bending genres and pushing boundaries of what is considered a poem, what is considered a song.

Jamila Woods

Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.

Basil Bunting

What is an artistic picture? An artistic picture is very simple. The creator is not the producer. The creator is not the star. The creator is the director, the person who realizes the picture, like a poet, like an artist. The creator of the picture is free to do whatever he wants, how he wants to do it. That is an artistic picture.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.

Mary Karr

...in song the words tend to lose their significance, do often lose it, while at the other extreme, in current prose it is the musical value that tends to disappear - so that verse stands symmetrically, as it were, between song, on the one hand, and prose on the other - and is thus admirably and delicately balanced between the sensual and the intellectual power of language.

Paul Valery

Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.