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... →
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... →
When we study Shakespeare on the page, for academic purposes, we may require all kinds of help. Generally, we read him in modern spelling and with... →
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... →
Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But... →
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... →
One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.
Great poetry does not have to be technically intricate.
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... →
In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have 'trained' or 'practised' enough. We will... →