83 Quotes by James Fenton

'Love' is so short of perfect rhymes that convention allows half-rhymes like 'move.' The alternative is a plague of doves, or a kind of poem in which the poet addresses his adored both as 'love' and as 'guv' - a perfectly decent solution once, but only once, in a while.

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

Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.

I prefer writing in the mornings, so to that extent I have a routine. I do reading and other things in the afternoon.

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.

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

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.

A really interesting and happy time was when I first went to Florence as a student and studied Italian. I was living in a pensione on an allowance of £40 a month, which was princely. I did a lot of work and enjoyed myself immensely.

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.