James Fenton

“The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint.”

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

“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 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing.”

“Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.”

“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.”

“What I want, when I write a poem, is no more than this: that it be preserved in some published form so that, in principle, someone, somewhere, will be able to find it and read it. That is all I need, as a poet, and that is the beauty, the luxury of my position. My lyric is mine and remains mine. Nobody can ruin it.”

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

“'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.”

“I've not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get... credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.”

“The term 'epitaph' itself means 'something to be spoken at a burial or engraved upon a tomb.' When an epitaph is a poem written for a tomb, and appears in a book, we are aware that we are not reading it in its proper form: we are reading a reproduction. The original of the epitaph is the tomb itself, with its words cut into the stone.”

“The 1960s was a period when writers in the West began to be aware of the extraordinary eloquence and popular attraction of the Russian poets such as Yevtushenko and Voznesensky - oppositional figures who could draw crowds. The Russian poets recited from memory as a matter of course.”

“Free verse seemed democratic because it offered freedom of access to writers. And those who disdained free verse would always be open to accusations of elitism, mandarinism. Open form was like common ground on which all might graze their cattle - it was not to be closed in by usurping landlords.”

“ראיתי ילד שגדל מתוך כאב. אחוז בידי. הישאר איתי.”

“הקשב לאשר הם עשו. אל תקשיב לאשר הם אמרו.”

“לא חשוב לי לאן נלך. אני בפריז איתך.”

“אבן זועקת לאבן. לב אל לב. אבן אל אבן.”

“הבדידות הייתה נפלאה כשחשתי חזק.”

“אדם צריך לכבד את מי שהוא היה.”

“אלף שנים חלפו תוך שתי שניות.”

“טבול ידך בתוך המים.”