James Fenton Quotes

The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.

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

My own verse is usually free verse. The freer the better.

Working alone on a poem, a poet is of all artists the most free. The poem can be written with a modicum of technology, and can be published, in most cases, quite cheaply.

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

The rhyme always knows better than you, and leads you to places where you wouldn't otherwise have gotten to and that is absolutely the case. Leading off from formal poetry, there is something about when you pay attention to form and you allow it to have its own laws and you listen to those laws you really do end up in places you wouldn't otherwise go. Which isn't to say that I believe in following the rules when I write. I don't. Each of the forms in my books feels to me new.

The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.

I feel in poetry there aren't that many rules that you need to absolutely live by depending on your style of poetry.

You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.

No poet is required to write in stanzas, or indeed in regular forms at all. Coleridge's 'Dejection: An Ode' has a rhyme scheme and sequence of long and short lines that goes without regular pattern, following the mood and whim of the poet. Such a form is known as an irregular ode.

But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

Sometimes, when you are in a really constrained situation, it makes you more focused about what you want to say and where you're heading. The most beautiful love poems that were ever written are sonnets, composed in a very constraining form.

The rules or 'laws' of poetry are only tentative devices, an approximate scheme. There is no Sinaitic recipe for poetry, for the individual poem is the norm.

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

To me, a poem that's in rhyme and meter is the difference between watching a film in full color and watching a film in black and white. Not that a few black and white films aren't wonderful. So are certain successful pieces of free verse.

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.

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.

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.

The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it.

I am increasingly attracted to restricting possibility in the poem by inflicting a form upon yourself. Once you impose some formal pattern on yourself, then the poem is pushing back. I think good poems are often the result of that kind of wrestling with the form.