Considering the wealth of poetic drama that has come down to us from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, it is surprising that… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
It normally happens that if you put two words together, or two syllables together, one of them will attract more weight, more… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
In song the same rule applies as in dramatic verse: the meaning must yield itself, or yield itself sufficiently to arouse the… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that… — James Fenton Beautiful Copy Share Image
Free verse seemed democratic because it offered freedom of access to writers. And those who disdained free verse would always be open… — James Fenton Access Copy Share Image
'Love' is so short of perfect rhymes that convention allows half-rhymes like 'move.' The alternative is a plague of doves, or a… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads,… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
The basic rhymes in English are masculine, which is to say that the last syllable of the line is stressed: 'lane' rhymes… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
The term 'epitaph' itself means 'something to be spoken at a burial or engraved upon a tomb.' When an epitaph is a… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept that there is any continuity between… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
What I want, when I write a poem, is no more than this: that it be preserved in some published form so… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on… — James Fenton Age Copy Share Image
Those who actually set out to see the fall of a city or those who choose to go to a front line,… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of… — James Fenton Addiction Copy Share Image
When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in… — James Fenton Academic Copy Share Image
A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
“It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down. It is not the houses. It is the spaces between… — James Fenton Destruction Copy Share Image
“God, A Poem 'I didn't exist at Creation, I didn't exist at the Flood, And I won't be around for Salvation To… — James Fenton God Copy Share Image
A really interesting and happy time was when I first went to Florence as a student and studied Italian. I was living… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
Working alone on a poem, a poet is of all artists the most free. The poem can be written with a modicum… — James Fenton Alone Copy Share Image
When Mr Ackroyd says that in the 18th century, stranglers bit off the noses of their victims, I feel that he probably… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
My sonnet asserts that the sonnet still lives. My epic, should such fortune befall me, asserts that the heroic narrative is not… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have 'trained' or 'practised' enough.… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
Rhyme is a mnemonic device, an aid to the memory. And some poems are themselves mnemonics, that is to say, the whole… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This… — James Fenton Ballads Copy Share Image
Hearing that the same men who brought us 'South Park' were mounting a musical to be called 'The Book of Mormon,' we… — James Fenton Book Copy Share Image
The 1960s was a period when writers in the West began to be aware of the extraordinary eloquence and popular attraction of… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
Metrics are not a device for restraining the mad, any more than 'open form' or free verse is a prairie where a… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
Generally speaking, rhyme is the marker for the end of a line. The first rhyme-word is like a challenge thrown down, which… — James Fenton Challenges Copy Share Image
No poet is required to write in stanzas, or indeed in regular forms at all. Coleridge's 'Dejection: An Ode' has a rhyme… — James Fenton Copy Share Image
The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where… — James Fenton Aftermath Copy Share Image
My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the… — James Fenton Death Copy Share Image
