In rap, as in most popular lyrics, a very low standard is set for rhyme; but this was not always the case with popular music. James Fenton Read Quote
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read. James Fenton Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Considering the wealth of poetic drama that has come down to us from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, it is surprising that so little of any value has been added since. James Fenton Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme. James Fenton Read Quote
The 1960s was a period when writers in the West began to be aware of the extraordinary eloquence and popular attraction of the Russian poets such as Yevtushenko and Voznesensky – oppositional figures who could draw crowds. The Russian poets recited from memory as a matter of course. James Fenton Read Quote
Some of my educated Filipino friends were aspiring poets, but their aspirations were all in the direction of the United States. They had no desire to learn from the bardic tradition that continued in the barrios. Their ideal would have been to write something that would get them to Iowa, where they would study creative writing. James Fenton Read Quote