Not poetry, but prose run mad. [ Pope ]

Eloquence is the poetry of prose. [ Bryant ]

Not all that heralds rake from coffin'd clay,
Nor florid prose, nor honeyed lines of rhyme,
Can blazon evil deeds or consecrate a crime. [ Byron ]

Nor florid prose, nor honied lies of rhyme,
Can blazon evil deeds, or consecrate a crime. [ Byron ]

Read Homer once, and you can read no more,
For all books else appear so mean, so poor.
Verse will seem prose, but still persist to read,
And Homer will be all the books you need. [ John Sheffield ]

Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry. [ J. C. and A. W. Hare ]

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose. [ Voltaire ]

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. [ Coleridge ]

In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose, - a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought. [ Mrs. Jameson ]

The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone. [ Niebuhr ]

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definiteness. [ Edgar Allan Poe ]

The lines of poetry, the periods of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be pre-eminently musical. [ Shenstone ]

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. [ Bulwer-Lytton ]

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions. [ Gladstone ]

Words are freeborn, and not the vassals of the gruff tyrants of prose to do their bidding only. They have the same right to dance and sing as the dewdrops have to sparkle and the stars to shine. [ Abraham Coles ]

D'Alembert tells us that Voltaire had always lying on his table the Petit Careme of Massillon and the Tragedies of Racine; the former to fix his taste in prose composition, and the latter in poetry. [ Dugald Stewart ]

The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning; if they attract attention to themselves, it is a fault; in the very best styles, as Southey's, you read page after page without noticing the medium. [ Coleridge ]

Harmony of period and melody of style have greater weight than is generally imagined in the judgment we pass upon writing and writers. As a proof of this, let us reflect what texts of scripture, what lines in poetry, or what periods we most remember and quote, either in verse or prose, and we shall find them to be only musical ones. [ Shenstone ]