Top 35 James Fenton Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.”

— James Fenton

2. “One does not become a guru by accident.”

— James Fenton

3. “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

4. “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

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

— James Fenton

6. “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

7. “The basic rhymes in English are masculine, which is to say that the last syllable of the line is stressed: ‘lane’ rhymes with ‘pain,’ but it also rhymes with ‘urbane’ since the last syllable of ‘urbane’ is stressed. ‘Lane’ does not rhyme with ‘methane.’”

— James Fenton

8. “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

9. “A nasty surprise in a sandwich.”

— James Fenton

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “Generally speaking, rhyme is the marker for the end of a line. The first rhyme-word is like a challenge thrown down, which the poem itself has to respond to.”

— James Fenton

14. “Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world.”

— James Fenton

15. “Babies are not brought by storks and poets are not produced by workshops.”

— James Fenton

16. “Oh let us not be condemned for what we are. It is enough to account for what we do.”

— James Fenton

17. “There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.”

— James Fenton

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.”

— James Fenton

23. “The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint.”

— James Fenton

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.”

— James Fenton

28. “Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.”

— James Fenton

29. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

30. “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

31. “I don’t see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.”

— James Fenton

32. “Hearing that the same men who brought us ‘South Park’ were mounting a musical to be called ‘The Book of Mormon,’ we were tempted to turn away, as from an inevitable massacre.”

— James Fenton

33. “What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page.”

— James Fenton

34. “Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.”

— James Fenton

35. “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

36. “When Mr Ackroyd says that in the 18th century, stranglers bit off the noses of their victims, I feel that he probably knows what he is talking about. I just wish he hadn’t told me.”

— James Fenton