James Fenton Quotes

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.

Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!

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

When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don't read much anymore.

I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I also love more cerebral poets like H.D. and Emily Dickinson. My parents subscribed to a monthly poetry periodical, and as a teenager I was introduced to Denise Levertov, who was an influence.

A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.

I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

The only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.

Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.

When I discovered the lyric poem, that advanced not by narrative steps but by blocks and layers of imagery, I said, 'Gee, I probably could do that. So let me try that.'