List of James Fenton Quotes

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 The Singer Room To Act, More Even Than An Opera Singer.

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.

Among Those Today Who Believe That Modern Poetry Must Do Without Rhyme Or Metre, There Is An Assumption That The Alternative To Free Verse Is A Crash Course In Villanelles, Sestinas And Other Such Fixed Forms. But Most... Are Rare In English Poetry. Few Poets Have Written A Villanelle Worth Reading, Or Indeed Regret Not Having Done So.

What Happened To Poetry In The Twentieth Century Was That It Began To Be Written For The Page.

Those Who Actually Set Out To See The Fall Of A City Or Those Who Choose To Go To A Front Line, Are Obviously Asking Themselves To What Extent They Are Cowards. But The Tests They Set Themselves - There Is A Dead Body, Can You Bear To Look At It? - Are Nothing In Comparison With The Tests That Are Sprung On Them. It Is Not The Obvious Tests That Matter (do You Go To Pieces In A Mortar Attack?) But The Unexpected Ones (here Is A Man On The Run, Seeking Your Help - Can You Face Him Honestly?).

Hearing That The Same Men Who Brought Us 'south Park' Were Mounting A Musical To Be Called 'the Book Of Mormon,' We Were Tempted To Turn Away, As From An Inevitable Massacre.

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.

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 Modern Punctuation, And With Notes. But Any Poetry That Is Performed - From Song Lyric To Tragic Speech - Must Make Its Point, As It Were, Without Reference Back.

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".

The Basic Rhymes In English Are Masculine, Which Is To Say That The Last Syllable Of The Line Is Stressed: "lane" Rhymes With "pain", But It Also Rhymes With "urbane" Since The Last Syllable Of "urbane" Is Stressed. "lane" Does Not Rhyme With "methane".

The Mormon Mission To Africa, As To Other Dark-skinned Parts Of The World, Was For A Long Time Hobbled By The Racism Of The Movement's Scripture.

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 Use For It, And The Kind Of Latin Poetry That Does Rhyme - As For Instance The Medieval Carmina Burana - Tends To Be Somewhat Crude Stuff In Comparison With The Classical Verse That Doesn't.