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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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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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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.
James Fenton
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I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.
James Fenton
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Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.
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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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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Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world.
James Fenton
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Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.
James Fenton
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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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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.
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.
James Fenton
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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
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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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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.
James Fenton
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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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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.
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.
James Fenton
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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.
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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One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.
James Fenton