James Fenton Quotes

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

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

In high school, we studied a lot of poetical forms. I was really interested in the math that was involved and the strange live break ups. That gave me a great amount of respect for a rhymed stanza.

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.

When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice.

The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose.

A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

No, I don't know any Emily Dickinson poems!

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.

I write... sonnets... and writing sonnets is boring. You have to find rhymes; you have to write hendecasyllables; so after a while, I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems.

Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.

I read mostly poetry.

The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.

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.

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

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell.

I never had much education in English poetry as such.

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.

After you kind of find your footing, sonnets are what comes easiest.

Many varieties of sonnet, of course, have been written over the ages.

When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.

I wrote some serious stuff in high school; however, I hadn't been exposed to any of the major poets, not even the minor ones... I read nothing but Sara Teasdale.

When you're doing poetry like mine that rhymes, it's very easy to sound like a song that didn't work out!