H. L. Mencken Quotes

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.

If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

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.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

I like poems that are little games.

Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.

A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.

I like poems that are complex.

Prose is like this big block - you write big paragraphs. I feel that when I'm reading and writing, that a prose book is kind of monolithic. But a song is more like a feather or something.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.

Literature is the stringing together of pictures in words.

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

I would not be able to pen an academic and dry diatribe. I have too much talent for that.

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

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it's a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.