James Fenton Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

'I didn't exist at Creation
I didn't exist at the Flood,
And I won't be around for Salvation
To sort out the sheep from the cud—
'Or whatever the phrase is. The fact is
In soteriological terms
I'm a crude existential malpractice
And you are a diet of worms.'

James Fenton
It normally happens that if you put two words together, or two syllables together, one of them will attract more weight, more emphasis, than the other. In other words, most so-called spondees can be read as either iambs or trochees.

James Fenton
Oh let us not be condemned for what we are. It is enough to account for what we do.

James Fenton
Yes
You have come upon the fabled lands where myths
Go when they die.

James Fenton
It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.
It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.
It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.

James Fenton
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
The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

James Fenton
When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with modern punctuation, and with notes. But any poetry that is performed - from song lyric to tragic speech - must make its point, as it were, without reference back.

James Fenton
Tienanmen
Is broad and clean
And you can't tell
Where the dead have been
And you can't tell
When they'll come again
They'll come again
To Tienanmen

James Fenton
Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash course in villanelles, sestinas and other such fixed forms. But most... are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so.

James Fenton
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
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
Writing for the page is only one form of writing for the eye. Wherever solemn inscriptions are put up in public places, there is a sense that the site and the occasion demand a form of writing which goes beyond plain informative prose. Each word is so valued that the letters forming it are seen as objects of solemn beauty.

James Fenton
He tells you, in the sombrest notes,
If poets want to get their oats,
The first step is to slit their throats.
The way to divide
The sheep of poetry from the goats
Is suicide.

James Fenton
Tennyson follows his feelings in creating each line. He follows the music in his head. If you had asked him, at the end of the day, to describe the prosody of the poem to you, he would no doubt have had to think for a moment before he could answer you, not because he was ignorant of the terms, but because he had been writing a poem, not a metrical exercise.

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

James Fenton
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
Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world.

James Fenton
Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country – it had all been done in our name.

James Fenton
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