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Poetry Quotes by James Fenton
- What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page.
- Babies are not brought by storks and poets are not produced by workshops.
- 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…
- English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the…
- Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.
- One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.
- Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.
- A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical age…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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 voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or…
- 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 writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.
- 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…
- The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically…
More Poetry Quotes
- Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. — Aristotle
- Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals,… — Aristotle
- I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come… — Paul Auster
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets.… — Paul Auster
- If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. — M H Abrams
- Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things. — Matthew Arnold
- I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places. — John Ashbery
- But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me… — Chinua Achebe
- 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
- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. — Wystan Hugh Auden