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From Quotes by James Fenton
- At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length…
- Considering the wealth of poetic drama that has come down to us from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, it is surprising that so little of…
- Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good…
- The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint.
- Imitation, if it is not forgery, is a fine thing. It stems from a generous impulse, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot…
- Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.
- One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- The 1960s was a period when writers in the West began to be aware of the extraordinary eloquence and popular attraction of the Russian poets…
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