James Fenton Quotes

Poets that lasting marble seek Must come in Latin or in Greek.

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.

With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem.

The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind him too; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather more strictly compelling.

I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I'm more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph.

The long poem cannot be a digressive, expansive, boring exposition. It is really made of very sharp, Imagistic, quintessential poetic elements.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

As storytellers, you're always somehow creating history.

I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories.

This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.

Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry's expressiveness.

Jack’s life had more to do with myth, legend, saga, and story than with political theory or political science.

Creating heroes and history are often at odds.

I want to be remembered as a storyteller.

I'm partial to epic poetry, which might be surprising given that I don't write poetry at all. The combination of rollicking storytelling with musical language seems to me the highest achievement.

From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

What I like about Sapphics is the music of a non-iambic metric in English.

It's great when you see things on a massive scale and you see these huge sets, but it's not the be-all and end-all - it can be about characters as well.

The monotony of a long heroic poem may often be pleasantly relieved by judicious interruptions in the perfect succession of rhymes, just as the metre may sometimes be adorned with occasional triplets and Alexandrines.

There's no place more theatrical than history.

I was always fascinated by the Torah, the Bible, in terms of story telling: heroes and villains, morality and flaws. There's no better epic. Also, being part Latin and Jewish means I have a sense of the theatrical. There were always a lot of people in my house. My home was always filled with a lot of storytellers.

I am a writer. I am rooted in Tolstoy, I am rooted in Homer, I am rooted in Cervantes.

The language of the heroic is something that has evolved over time.

As a reader with next to no knowledge of classical mythology, I approached 'The Aeneid' just as I would a contemporary poem or novel - and, despite my ignorance, I was rewarded with a rich and affecting portrait of, among other things, the memorably doomed love affair between Aeneas and Dido.

Of what violences, murders, depredations, have not the epic poets, from all antiquity, been the occasion, by propagating false honor, false glory, and false religion?