I will not be a slave to my yesterday. I am creator, not a parrot. - Vachel Lindsay

Poetry is for the inner ear

I have sung my songs to my own tunes for most of the English departments of the state universities of the forty-eight states of the nation, and the English departments of other universities and colleges; and I have been recalled to many of these seven and eight times, which matters are a source of great pride to me. And I have brought out three books where the songs were based on my own pen-and-ink pictures.

The fact that you can write verse is in itself a certificate that you can write prose.