Art & Creativity Quote by Shelby Foote

Foote’s throwaway “incidentally” is doing the heavy lifting: it pretends to shrug off a value judgment while quietly declaring a conversion. The line reads like a small act of literary secession from the prestige of poetry toward the sprawling, lived-in country of narrative. He’s not only confessing an artistic trajectory; he’s staking a claim about where meaning actually happens for him.

Calling prose “a lot more interesting than poetry” is less a diss than a reframing of what “music” can be. Foote wants to rescue rhythm from the narrow custody of meter and line breaks. “Including the rhythms of prose” is his tell: he’s arguing that prose isn’t the rhythm-less default form you settle for when you can’t sing. It can swing, breathe, accelerate, stall, and cadence with just as much intention, only it does it under the cover of ordinary speech. That’s a novelist and historian’s sensibility: style as a pacing mechanism, not an ornamental one.

Context matters. Foote became famous not as a poet but as a storyteller of the Civil War, a subject where the moral and sensory weight accumulates through accumulation - scenes, voices, digressions, and the slow pressure of consequence. Sonnets are engineered for compression and rhetorical closure; Foote’s great subject demanded room to move, to turn over contradictions without forcing them into a tidy box. The subtext is ambition: prose lets him build a world, and rhythm is the invisible tool that keeps that world from going dead on the page.