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

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

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

— James Fenton

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.

— James Fenton

Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare. And anyway, Anglo-Saxon is a different language, which has to be learned.

— James Fenton

The great cause of the new Republican intake is the reduction of the deficit but to anyone seeking evidence of sincere attempts at deficit-reduction the evidence is baffling. The Republicans showed before Christmas that they would seek to reduce the deficit but not when it came to a matter of the tax breaks that had aggravated the deficit in the first place. Now there's a date set for the abolition of Barack Obama's healthcare plan, parts of which only came into operation at the start of this month. The Republicans are out to destroy the plan. Or, more precisely, to pretend to destroy the plan in the name of making good on election pledges. The measure won't get past the Senate. But suppose it did get past the Senate, what effect would this have on the deficit? The answer is it would aggravate the deficit. Somehow, somewhere, there's an override mechanism that makes destroying Obamacare more important than destroying the deficit. If only one could figure out how it works.

— James Fenton

The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.

— James Fenton

The Ideal This is where I came from. I passed this way. This should not be shameful Or hard to say. A self is a self. It is not a screen. A person should respect What he has been. This is my past Which I shall not discard. This is the ideal. This is hard.

— James Fenton

The Mistake With the mistake your life goes in reverse. Now you can see exactly what you did Wrong yesterday and wrong the day beforehand each mistake leads back to something worse And every nuance of your hypocrisy Towards yourself, and every excuse Stands solidly on the perspective lines And there is perfect visibility. What an enlightenment. The colonnade Rolls past on either side. You needn't move. The statues of your errors brush your sleeve. You watch the tale turn back — and you're dismayed. And this dismay at this, this big mistakes made worse by the sight of all those who Knew all along where these mistakes would lead — Those frozen friends who watched the crisis

— James Fenton

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