James Fenton Quotes

When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Gene...

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its trans...

Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept ...

Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty importe...

Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends a...

In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have 'trained' or...

One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train our...

God, A Poem 'I didn't exist at Creation, I didn't exist at the Flood, And I won't be around for Salv...

It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.It is not the houses. It is the spaces betwe...

Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentie...

An aria in an opera - Handel's 'Ombra mai fu,' for example - gets along with an incredibly small num...

Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mosso...

The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of ...

The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blan...

The IdealThis is where I came from.I passed this way.This should not be shameful Or hard to say.A se...

A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispens...

The MistakeWith the mistake your life goes in reverse.Now you can see exactly what you didWrong yest...

My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest f...

The great cause of the new Republican intake is the reduction of the deficit but to anyone seeking e...