In general, dividing literature into prose and poetry began with the appearance of prose, for only in prose could such a division be expressed. By its nature, by its essence, art is hierarchical, automatically, and in this hierarchy, poetry stands above prose. If only because poetry is older. Poetry really is a very strange thing, because it belongs to a troglodyte as well as to a snob. It can be produced in the Stone Age and in the most modern salon, whereas prose requires a developed society, a developed structure, certain established classes, if you like. Here you could start reasoning like a Marxist without even being wrong. The poet works from the voice, from the sound. For him, content is not as important as is ordinarily believed. For a poet, there is almost no difference between phonetics and semantics. Therefore, only very rarely does the poet give any thought to who in fact comprises his audience. That is, he does so much more rarely than the prose writer. Joseph Brodsky
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More Quotes By Joseph Brodsky
  1. Life–the way it really is–is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

  2. For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

  3. ...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

  4. ... Now to die of griefwould mean, I'm afraid, to die belatedly, while latecomersare unwelcome, particularly in the future....

  5. There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

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