“No man is the whole of himself until he has developed this capacity to see something in life besides its prose. (Written or spoken language in its ordinary form, dull or shallow, but factual.) 

We can, to be sure, put into prose our business letters, the daily news, the round of family gossip, the quotations of the stock exchange;   the details of factual experience can be set in bare, plain prose.

But no one should suppose that this represents the full truth about anything. 

If one would know the truth about an eagle, he may consult a scientific textbook and learn the ornithological details. 

They will be correct, but they will not be adequate to describe an eagle. 

Let the poet Tennyson, for example, supply some of the lack: 

“He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands, 

Ringed with the azure world, he stands. 

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls, 

And like a thunderbolt he falls.”

That is an eagle! 

Any man’s life has been a failure when its whole story can be told in prosaic (ordinary, commonplace, unromantic, uninspired) indicative sentences. 

The deepest and finest experiences of humankind have always been expressed in poetry, bodied forth in pictures, symbolized in imagination, set to music and sung. 

All of Christmas could not be expressed without evergreen trees, holly, mistletoe, angels, carols and giving. 

The masters of history articulate what we experience but cannot say.” 

Harry Emerson Fosdick.