62. What is poetry?

Poetry is prose in slow motion. Now, that isn’t true of rhymed poems. It’s not true of Sir Walter Scott. It’s not true of Longfellow, or Tennyson, or Swinburne, or Yeats. Rhymed poems are different. But the kind of free-verse poems that most poets write now — the kind that I write — is slow-motion prose.

(Sagt der Romanheld in Nicholson Bakers „The anthologist“, Rezension New York Times 10.9., Probekapitel)

THE ANTHOLOGIST
By Nicholson Baker
243 pp. Simon & Schuster. $25

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