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James Fenton Quotes


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Quotes by James Fenton

Showing 41-50 of 55 Quotes by James Fenton

The iambic line, with its characteristic forward movement from short to long, or light to heavy, or unstressed to stressed, is the quintessential measure of English verse.

~James Fenton

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

~James Fenton

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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 subtle variations on the same theme.

~James Fenton

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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 that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.'

~James Fenton

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For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

~James Fenton

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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

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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 have left the grades behind and are now embarked on an advanced training.

~James Fenton

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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.

~James Fenton

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

~James Fenton

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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

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Biography

Nationality: British

Type: Poet

Born: April 25th, 1949

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