James Fenton Quotes

At somewhere around 10 syllables, the English poetic line is at its most relaxed and manageable.

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.

The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines.

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.

A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.

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.

The main thing a poem ought to be is musical. It should be rhythmic. You should hear it as a musical piece in your head as you're writing it.

The glorious Dryden, refiner and purifier of English verse, did less for rhyme than he did for metre.

The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.

In America, a metrical poem is likely to conjure up the idea of the sort of poet who wears ties and lunches at the faculty club. In Russia it suggests the moral force of an art practiced against the greatest personal odds, as a discipline, solitary and intense.

This is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word.

There is a formal poetry perfect only in form?the number of syllables, the designated and required stresses of accent, the rhymes if wantedthey come off with the skill of a solved crossword puzzle.

The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics.

Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck.

I discover poetry when I was in elementary school and I was so fascinated by it. Because I realised if you get the right amount of syllables and the right amount of words, in the right rhyme scheme and you put it all together. You make words just bounce of a page.

I write poetry. It comes naturally to me, but from a technical point of view it forces me to pay close attention to language and to scan.

Honestly, I can't understand English poetry. Because I am not an English speaker, when I read it I never know how to read it in the right rhythm.

To understand Vers libre, one must abandon all desire to find in it the even rhythm of metrical feet. One must allow the lines to flow as they will when read aloud by an intelligent reader.

I think that happens for a lot of people, they have this idea that there's only one type of way to write poetry and that you have to have this information. You have to know about meter, you have to know about form, you have to know about iambic pentameter, and all of that.

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.

No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem, - a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.