A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical age had no use for it, and the kind of Latin poetry that does rhyme - as for instance the medieval 'Carmina Burana' - tends to be somewhat crude stuff in comparison with the classical verse that doesn't.

— James Fenton

An aria in an opera - Handel's 'Ombra mai fu,' for example - gets along with an incredibly small number of words and ideas and a large amount of variation and repetition. That's the beauty of it. It's not taxing to the listener's intelligence because if you haven't heard it the first time round, it'll come around again.

— James Fenton

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

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

God, A Poem 'I didn't exist at Creation, I didn't exist at the Flood, And I won't be around for Salvation To sort out the sheep from the cud-'Or whatever the phrase is. The fact ISIN soteriological terms'm a crude existential malpractice And you are a diet of worms

— James Fenton

Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.

— James Fenton

In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have 'trained' or 'practiced' enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached grade eight, or that we have left the grades behind and are now embarked on an advanced training.

— James Fenton

It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down. It is not the houses. Furthermore, it is the spaces between the houses. It is not the streets that exist. Furthermore, it is the streets that no longer exist.

— 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 the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrapher,' that sort of thing.

— James Fenton

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