Unfortunately, information about the author is unknown to us. But you can add it. Read full biography of James Fenton →
In my opinion, it is easier to avoid iambic rhythms, when writing in syllabics, if you create a line or pattern of lines using odd numbers of... →
In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have 'trained' or 'practised' enough. We will... →
A cabaret song has got to be written - for the middle voice, ideally - because you've got to hear the wit of the words. And a cabaret song gives... →
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... →
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... →
If you're writing a song, you have to write something that can be understood serially. When you're reading a poem that's written for the... →
In song the same rule applies as in dramatic verse: the meaning must yield itself, or yield itself sufficiently to arouse the attention and interest... →
Rhyme is a mnemonic device, an aid to the memory. And some poems are themselves mnemonics, that is to say, the whole purpose of the poem is to enable... →
Sometimes I have thought that a song should look disappointing on the page - a little thin, perhaps, a little repetitive, or a little on the obvious... →
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... →
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... →
There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you... →
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... →
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