James Fenton Quotes

Reading a poem aloud to an audience is gestural as much as precise.

I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.

One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

All poetry is difficult to read - The sense of it anyhow.

In law school they teach you that everything is a contract; well, in poetry everything is a narrative.

It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.

My life has included a study of Shakespeare and to me it's very natural, but I know that it's not always accessible to other people.

I guess because you study the character and you do all those things. But when it comes down to it, it's still my performance, it's still my interpretation. I'm not going to, you know, be a clone - well, I was a clone of Richard Dean Anderson!

That's all there was in our house: poetry and choir rehearsal and duets and so forth; I listened to Dad and Mother discuss things about poetry and delivery and voice and diction - I don't think anyone could know how much it really means.

I was trying to pay the bills with poems, and it was easy to memorize my poems, because I'd be riding my bike in California trying to memorize them before going on stage at a poetry lounge.

My thesis at school was on Wordsworth.

My mother taught Shakespeare and used to act.

My childhood was all about going to church, singing in church. And later on, after I got a little older, my mother taught me how to do poems for Easter and Mother's Day, recitals and so on. I got attached to that, so as I got older and older, I began to recite poetry.

I've really been studying lyrics, printing out lyrics to songs I love and reading them like a letter.

I did study with Anne Carson briefly in Michigan. She taught there, and that's where I first encountered her, in her class.

Because I was writing verse, my instructor suggested I study Shakespeare. The Shakespeare teacher insisted you couldn't understand the text without seeing it on its feet.

It doesn't seem Shakespeare works if you turn him into a religion.

What, if not Shakespeare, is open for interpretation?

I spent many years in college studying English literature. I was on the verge of attending grad school to get a Ph.D. in Renaissance poetry - my lost careers were being a writer, artist, or academic. Do I regret spending all that time poring over Shakespeare when I could have been getting a jump start on the competition? Not at all.

Even Shakespeare gives you a scene off.

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it.

I can only do the best I can from what I read from the book, and hopefully it translates on camera.