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 …

- James Fenton

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

- James Fenton

Babies are not brought by storks and poets are not produced by workshops.

- James Fenton

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 su…

- 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

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 th…

- James Fenton

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

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

Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliatio…

- James Fenton