James Fenton Quotes

It's really hard to find a lot of things that rhyme with Michael Diamond.

The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.

Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.

In rap, as in most popular lyrics, a very low standard is set for rhyme; but this was not always the case with popular music.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

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.

At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.

I really like when the lyrics in the music have an interesting relationship between one another - where they contrast each other.

It's also crazy how Shakespeare has that cadence, and it's about locking into the jazz of the language, just like locking into the rhythm in N.W.A's lyrics.

Assonance is not the enemy of rhyme. It helps us to respect rhyme, which has been spoiled by mechanical use.

One of the deep fundamentals of poetry is the recurrence of sounds, syllables, words, phrases, lines, and stanzas. Repetition can be one of the most intoxicating features of poetry. It creates expectations, which can be fulfilled or frustrated. It can create a sense of boredom and complacency, but it can also incite enchantment and inspire bliss.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

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

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

In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.

My favorite poem ever was 'Annabel Lee' by Edgar Allan Poe.

'Love' is so short of perfect rhymes that convention allows half-rhymes like 'move.' The alternative is a plague of doves, or a kind of poem in which the poet addresses his adored both as 'love' and as 'guv' - a perfectly decent solution once, but only once, in a while.

Shakespeare is rhythmic; he is musical in the sense that he likes poetry, and he's musical because he constantly refers to settings where there's singing and dancing.

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

Form is endlessly interesting to me, and I love poetry as a formal enterprise.

I like poems that are little games.

Shakespeare's taught me that there are more words in the English language than I have got in my head.

I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

There is a musical rhythm to great writing, especially if it's performed correctly.