James Fenton Quotes

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

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 be done.

The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint.

Babies are not brought by storks and poets are not produced by workshops.

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 turn away, as from an inevitable massacre.

One does not become a guru by accident.

In rap, as in most popular lyrics, a very low standard is set for rhyme; but this was not always the case with popular music.

Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world.

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, simple subjects - love, death, war.

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 English language extends.

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.

The Mormon mission to Africa, as to other dark-skinned parts of the world, was for a long time hobbled by the racism of the movement's scripture.

One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.

Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.

Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.

When Mr Ackroyd says that in the 18th century, stranglers bit off the noses of their victims, I feel that he probably knows what he is talking about. I just wish he hadn't told me.

My sonnet asserts that the sonnet still lives. My epic, should such fortune befall me, asserts that the heroic narrative is not lost - that it is born again.

What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page.

The composer does not want the self-sufficiency of a richly complex text: he or she wants to feel that the text is something in need of musical setting.

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 any value has been added since.

At somewhere around 10 syllables, the English poetic line is at its most relaxed and manageable.

Oh let us not be condemned for what we are. It is enough to account for what we do.

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 you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.

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 has to respond to.

I prefer writing in the mornings, so to that extent I have a routine. I do reading and other things in the afternoon.

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 proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.

I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.

It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.