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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

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Poetry

More quotes by James Fenton

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

Imitation, if it is not forgery, is a fine thing. It stems from a generous impulse, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be done.

The composer does not want the self-sufficiency of a richly complex text: he or she wants to feel that the text is something in need of musical setting.

An Introduction to English Poetry (2002)

My sonnet asserts that the sonnet still lives. My epic, should such fortune befall me, asserts that the heroic narrative is not lost — that it is born again.

An Introduction to English Poetry (2002)

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

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: James Fenton (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.