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Poem Quotes by James Fenton
- I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.
- 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…
- 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…
- '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…
- 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,…
- The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.
- 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…
- 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,…
- 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…
More Poem Quotes
- If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. — M H Abrams
- I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases… — Margaret Atwood
- The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is… — Margaret Atwood
- For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its… — Paul Auster
- A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically. — Diane Ackerman
- I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem. — Beck
- Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the… — John Berger
- Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice. — James Buchan
- But short films are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you… — Jane Campion
- If you cannot be a poet, be the poem. — David Carradine
- A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction. — A. R. Ammons
- Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take. — A. R. Ammons