Quotes by : James Fenton

God, A Poem 'I didn't exist at Creation, I didn't exist at the Flood, And I won't be around for SalvationTo....

The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism,....

One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves....

Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov,....

The great cause of the new Republican intake is the reduction of the deficit but to anyone seeking evidence....

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

Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth....

It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.It is not the houses. It is the spaces between....

A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable.....

My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals....