Daily Inspiration Quote by David Hare

Hare’s line is a neat little grenade lobbed at the border guards of genre. By declaring that eighteenth-century poetry “was prose” and seventeenth-century prose “was poetry,” he’s not merely flipping labels; he’s exposing how our categories often lag behind the real work language is doing. The joke has teeth because it’s an inversion that feels instantly plausible. Anyone who’s slogged through didactic couplets or encyclopedic verse from the long eighteenth century knows how poetry can become a delivery system for argument, instruction, and social management. Meanwhile, seventeenth-century prose - Donne’s sermons, Browne’s baroque meditations, even the King James Bible’s cultural afterimage - can sound intoxicated with rhythm, image, and metaphysical reach.

As a playwright, Hare is also smuggling in a defense of dramatic language: what matters is not the label on the spine but the temperature of the sentence. “Poetry” here stands for compression, musicality, risk; “prose” for clarity, reason, and the forward march of ideas. His subtext is that periods get remembered for their dominant posture. The seventeenth century is imagined as ornate, spiritually charged, rhetorically extravagant; the eighteenth as Enlightenment-bright, polished, and explanatory. Hare’s wit lands because it’s half taxonomy, half complaint: when art becomes too orderly, it loses its strangeness. When “mere” prose dares to sing, it reminds poetry what it’s for.