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 Read Quote
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. James Fenton Read Quote
In song the same rule applies as in dramatic verse: the meaning must yield itself, or yield itself sufficiently to arouse the attention and interest, in real time. James Fenton Read Quote
I’ve not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get… credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot. James Fenton Read Quote
In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have ‘trained’ or ‘practised’ enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached grade eight, or that we have left the grades behind and are now embarked on an advanced training. James Fenton Read Quote
The iambic line, with its characteristic forward movement from short to long, or light to heavy, or unstressed to stressed, is the quintessential measure of English verse. James Fenton Read Quote
The term ‘epitaph’ itself means ‘something to be spoken at a burial or engraved upon a tomb.’ When an epitaph is a poem written for a tomb, and appears in a book, we are aware that we are not reading it in its proper form: we are reading a reproduction. The original of the epitaph is the tomb itself, with its words cut into the stone. James Fenton Read Quote
An aria in an opera – Handel’s ‘Ombra mai fu,’ for example – gets along with an incredibly small number of words and ideas and a large amount of variation and repetition. That’s the beauty of it. It’s not taxing to the listener’s intelligence because if you haven’t heard it the first time round, it’ll come around again. James Fenton Read Quote
In my opinion, it is easier to avoid iambic rhythms, when writing in syllabics, if you create a line or pattern of lines using odd numbers of syllables. James Fenton Read Quote