3 James Fenton Quotes on Form

James Fenton quotes on form

9. In the latter part of the nineteenth century there was a craze for metrical experiments which introduced or reintroduced several old French and Italian forms to English and American practice. The intricacy of these fixed forms appealed to all kinds of people who like to fiddle with words. There were ballades, chants royal, kyrielles, pantoums, rondeaux, rondels, rondeaux redoubles, Sicilian octaves, roundels, sestinas, triolets, villanelles and virelais to play with, and poets of varying merit had a go. The fascination of Provencal poetry for Ezra Pound comes out of this mostly unpromising milieu, and it is interesting that Pound should have been in the end one of those most associated with the complete upheaval in poetic practice that constituted modernism. 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 of those mentioned in the previous paragraph are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so.

10. Tennyson follows his feelings in creating each line. He follows the music in his head. If you had asked him, at the end of the day, to describe the prosody of the poem to you, he would no doubt have had to think for a moment before he could answer you, not because he was ignorant of the terms, but because he had been writing a poem, not a metrical exercise. At every point, he was exerting his free will. And the outcome of that exertion was the form.

12. Can the ear hear a thirteen-syllable line as consisting of thirteen syllables? I don't think so, but I think that a series of thirteen-syllable lines (supposing that was the length chosen) would, after a while, begin to have a characteristic resemblance. For the most part, though, counting the syllables seems to be something that works, if it works, for the poet. It is a private method of organization.