James Fenton Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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 not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing.”
-- James Fenton -
“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.”
-- James Fenton -
“The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint.”
-- James Fenton -
“The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.”
-- James Fenton -
“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.”
-- James Fenton -
“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. It's not taxing to the listener's intelligence because if you haven't heard it the first time round, it'll come around again.”
-- James Fenton -
“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.”
-- James Fenton -
“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.”
-- James Fenton -
“I've not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get... credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.”
-- James Fenton -
“'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 in which the poet addresses his adored both as 'love' and as 'guv' - a perfectly decent solution once, but only once, in a while.”
-- James Fenton -
“The basic rhymes in English are masculine, which is to say that the last syllable of the line is stressed: 'lane' rhymes with 'pain,' but it also rhymes with 'urbane' since the last syllable of 'urbane' is stressed. 'Lane' does not rhyme with 'methane.'”
-- James Fenton -
“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 to learn from the bardic tradition that continued in the barrios. Their ideal would have been to write something that would get them to Iowa, where they would study creative writing.”
-- James Fenton -
“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 metrical as of free verse.”
-- James Fenton -
“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.”
-- James Fenton -
“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 rhyme - as for instance the medieval 'Carmina Burana' - tends to be somewhat crude stuff in comparison with the classical verse that doesn't.”
-- James Fenton -
“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.”
-- James Fenton -
“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, any text can be set to work.”
-- James Fenton -
“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.”
-- James Fenton -
“At somewhere around 10 syllables, the English poetic line is at its most relaxed and manageable.”
-- James Fenton -
“Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.”
-- James Fenton -
“I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.”
-- James Fenton -
“I prefer writing in the mornings, so to that extent I have a routine. I do reading and other things in the afternoon.”
-- James Fenton -
“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.”
-- James Fenton -
“Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.”
-- James Fenton -
“One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.”
-- James Fenton -
“Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.”
-- James Fenton -
“A really interesting and happy time was when I first went to Florence as a student and studied Italian. I was living in a pensione on an allowance of £40 a month, which was princely. I did a lot of work and enjoyed myself immensely.”
-- 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 of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.”
-- James Fenton -
“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.”
-- James Fenton
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