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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.

James Fenton

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James Fenton
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: May 25
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Poet
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James M. Fenton
James Martin Fenton
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More quotes by James Fenton

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When Mr Ackroyd says that in the 18th century, stranglers bit off the noses of their victims, I feel that he probably knows what he is talking about. I just wish he hadn't told me.
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My sonnet asserts that the sonnet still lives. My epic, should such fortune befall me, asserts that the heroic narrative is not lost - that it is born again.
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Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing.
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For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.
James Fenton
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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.
James Fenton
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The basic rhymes in English are masculine, which is to say that the last syllable of the line is stressed: lane rhymes with pain, but it also rhymes with urbane since the last syllable of urbane is stressed. Lane does not rhyme with methane.
James Fenton
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Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.
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Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world.
James Fenton
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The Mormon mission to Africa, as to other dark-skinned parts of the world, was for a long time hobbled by the racism of the movement's scripture.
James Fenton
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Oh let us not be condemned for what we are. It is enough to account for what we do.
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A cabaret song has got to be written - for the middle voice, ideally - because you've got to hear the wit of the words. And a cabaret song gives the singer room to act, more even than an opera singer.
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Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.
James Fenton
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The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint.
James Fenton
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The composer does not want the self-sufficiency of a richly complex text: he or she wants to feel that the text is something in need of musical setting.
James Fenton
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Free verse seemed democratic because it offered freedom of access to writers. And those who disdained free verse would always be open to accusations of elitism, mandarinism. Open form was like common ground on which all might graze their cattle - it was not to be closed in by usurping landlords.
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I prefer writing in the mornings, so to that extent I have a routine. I do reading and other things in the afternoon.
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Hearing that the same men who brought us 'South Park' were mounting a musical to be called 'The Book of Mormon,' we were tempted to turn away, as from an inevitable massacre.
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My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.
James Fenton
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A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.
James Fenton
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Imitation, if it is not forgery, is a fine thing. It stems from a generous impulse, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be done.
James Fenton