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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
Author
Correspondent
Journalist
Literary Critic
Opinion Journalist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
James M. Fenton
James Martin Fenton
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Rhyme
Lines
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Word
Poem
Ends
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More quotes by 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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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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Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world.
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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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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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The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where open form or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term heightened speech.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Oh let us not be condemned for what we are. It is enough to account for what we do.
James Fenton
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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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Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.
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One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical age had no use for it, and the kind of Latin poetry that does rhyme - as for instance the medieval Carmina Burana - tends to be somewhat crude stuff in comparison with the classical verse that doesn't.
James Fenton