Best James Fenton Quotes
- A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one… Anticipation
- An aria in an opera - Handel's 'Ombra mai fu,' for example - gets along with an incredibly small number of words and ideas and… Along
- Generally speaking, rhyme is the marker for the end of a line. The first rhyme-word is like a challenge thrown down, which the poem itself… Challenge
- Hearing that the same men who brought us 'South Park' were mounting a musical to be called 'The Book of Mormon,' we were tempted to… Book
- I've not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in… Always Seemed
- 'Love' is so short of perfect rhymes that convention allows half-rhymes like 'move.' The alternative is a plague of doves, or a kind of poem… Address
- Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to… Beautiful
- Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as… Art
- My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme,… Come Back
- Some of my educated Filipino friends were aspiring poets, but their aspirations were all in the direction of the United States. They had no desire… All
- The basic rhymes in English are masculine, which is to say that the last syllable of the line is stressed: 'lane' rhymes with 'pain,' but… Basic
- The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or… Aftermath
- There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing… Learn
- When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and… Academic
- Writing for the page is only one form of writing for the eye. Wherever solemn inscriptions are put up in public places, there is a… Beauty
- The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation. Child
- Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because… Acquainted
- Working alone on a poem, a poet is of all artists the most free. The poem can be written with a modicum of technology, and… All
- What I want, when I write a poem, is no more than this: that it be preserved in some published form so that, in principle,… Able
- In song the same rule applies as in dramatic verse: the meaning must yield itself, or yield itself sufficiently to arouse the attention and interest,… Applies
- Sometimes I have thought that a song should look disappointing on the page - a little thin, perhaps, a little repetitive, or a little on… All
- In my opinion, it is easier to avoid iambic rhythms, when writing in syllabics, if you create a line or pattern of lines using odd… Avoid
- Rhyme is a mnemonic device, an aid to the memory. And some poems are themselves mnemonics, that is to say, the whole purpose of the… Aid
- This is what rhyme does. In a couplet, the first rhyme is like a question to which the second rhyme is an answer. The first… Air
- The iambic line, with its characteristic forward movement from short to long, or light to heavy, or unstressed to stressed, is the quintessential measure of… Characteristic