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On the art of writing: Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge, 1913-1914
On the art of writing Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 19131914 Author:Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill On the Difference between Verse and Prose You will forgive me, Gentlemen, that having in my second lecture encouraged you to the practice of verse as w... more »ell as of prose, I seize the very next opportunity to warn you against confusing the two, which differ on some points essentially, and always so as to demand separate rules—or rather (since I am shy of the word "rules") a different concept of what the writer should aim at and what avoid. But you must, pray, understand that what follows will be more useful to the tiro in prose than to the tiro in verse; for while even a lecturer may help you to avoid writing prose in the manner of Milton, only the gods— and they hardly—can cure a versifier of being prosaic. We started upon a promise to do without scientific definitions; and in drawing some distinctions to-day between verse and prose I shall use only a few rough ones; good, as I hope, so far asthey go; not to be found contrary to your scientific ones, if ever, under another teacher you attain to them; yet for the moment used only as guides to practice, and pretending to be no more. Thus I go some way—though by no means all the way—towards defining literature when I remind you that its very name (litterae—letters) implies the written rather than the spoken word; that, for example, however closely they approximate one to the other as we trace them back, and even though we trace them back to identical beginnings, the writer—the man of letters— does to-day differ from the orator. There was a time, as you know, when the poet and the historian had no less than the orator, and in the most literal sense, to "get a hearing." Nay, he got it with more pains: for the orator had his senate-house or his law-court provided, whereas Thespis jogged co fairs in a cart, and the Muse of H...« less