Quotes by James Fenton

“God, A Poem 'I didn't exist at Creation, I didn't exist at the Flood, And I won't be around for SalvationTo sort out the sheep from the cud-'Or whatever the phrase is. The fact isIn soteriological ...”

“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.”

“The great cause of the new Republican intake is the reduction of the deficit but to anyone seeking evidence of sincere attempts at deficit-reduction the evidence is baffling. The Republicans showed...”

“The IdealThis is where I came from.I passed this way.This should not be shameful Or hard to say.A self is a self. It is not a screen. A person should respectWhat he has been. This is my past Which ...”

“The MistakeWith the mistake your life goes in reverse.Now you can see exactly what you didWrong yesterday and wrong the day beforeAnd each mistake leads back to something worseAnd every nuance of y...”

“An aria in an opera - Handel's 'Ombra mai fu,' for example - gets along with an incredibly small number of words and ideas and a large amount of variation and repetition. That's the beauty of it. I...”

“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 we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhy...”

“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 easily be a quality of m...”

“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.”

“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 be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why ...”

“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.”

“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 the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established i...”

“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 with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry...”

“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 point to make. With revolutionary music...”

“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 had no use for it, and the kind of Latin poetry that does...”

“Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.”

“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 measured lines. It sounds like a series of su...”

“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 free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of ...”

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

“In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have 'trained' or 'practised' enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached grade eight, or that we ha...”