James Fenton Quotes

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.

I've always been - as a teacher, as graduate student, as a student, and I think, really, as a child - I've been interested in poems, but not so much for what the take home pay is, what you might sum up from them in moral or intellectual terms or whatever, but what's in the certain lines and how lines relates to other lines.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.

The Italian word 'stanza' means 'a room', and a room is a good way to conceive of a stanza. A room, generally speaking, is sufficient for its own purposes, but it does not constitute a house. A stanza has the same sense of containment, without being complete or independent.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

It's not easy to define poetry.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.

There's something so wonderful about writing in rhyme where it isn't just the meaning of the words, it's the music to the words and the shape and the sound.

Poetry is not an issue of form and enjambments. Poetry, as the word is classically used, has to do with sound and sense. It can be rhyme. It can be rhythm, pace, breath.

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.

Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just.

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.

Poetry itself is music. I'm just lucky that I can convert it into music. William Blake is my favorite poet of all time, and he said that he wasn't quite familiar with the sounds of music. If so, he would have been a musician. All of his poems are all like songs, and that's how I always try to start my thoughts.

The difference between 'lighght' and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn't have a reading process. Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn't. You can see it all at once. It's instant.

Poetry, first and foremost, is the lyric. It's the music.

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.