James Fenton Quotes

In high school, we studied a lot of poetical forms. I was really interested in the math that was involved and the strange live break ups. That gave me a great amount of respect for a rhymed stanza.

The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a - you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet.

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

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

Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

I write... sonnets... and writing sonnets is boring. You have to find rhymes; you have to write hendecasyllables; so after a while, I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

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

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

I like poems that are little games.

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

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 like poems that are complex.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare!

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.

After you kind of find your footing, sonnets are what comes easiest.

In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.

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.

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.