James Fenton Quotes

We do inherently know that poetry is about the way we speak. It's about where we pause, where we drop our words in the middle of a sentence. It's about the rhythm and the cadence of the way we speak. It's about putting that down at the end of the day.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

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

I teach writing courses and first of all, I teach my students what prosody is.

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

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

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.

Take a simple name like Nicholas: you can rhyme it with ridiculous. If you aren't too meticulous. You know, every word's rhymable.

I've spent so much time with iambic pentameter that I can now recognize it when I hear it in conversation or a movie - it's like a weird, useless superpower.

Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.

I am a poet, bard, scop, minnesinger, trobairitz who is driven by sound and the possibilities for vocal expression, the mouthing of text as well as intentionality or dance on the page.

Poetry is music, and nothing but music. Words with musical emphasis.

What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?

Trochee trips from long to short; From long to long in solemn sort Slow Spondee stalks.

I like words. I like the way they clash around together and bang up against each other, especially in songs.

Accent [emphasis] is the soul of speech; it gives it feeling and truth.

The earliest English attempts at rhyming probably included words whose agreement is so slight that it deserves the name of mere 'assonance' rather than that of actual rhyme.

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'm trying to make the poems as musical as I can - from the inception. So that whether they're read on the page, or people read them aloud, or I read them aloud, the musicality will be kind of a given.

Versification is, indeed, indispensable for music, but rhyme, solely for rhyming's sake, most pernicious.

The rhythmical unit of the syllable is at the back of all of it - the word, the phrase, the sentence, the syntax, the paragraph, and the way the heart moves when you read it.

I've always really enjoyed sounds and alliteration and funny words and funny melodies.

I think my love for rhythm in language comes from repeating the same words, the same sounds, over and over again day after day for so many years.