James Fenton Reads

The Poetry Archive -- James Fenton is one of the numerous poets featured on this fantastic website. Visit Fenton's special Poetry Archive webpage and listen to recordings of him reading the poems 'Wind', 'Blood and Lead', 'Jerusalem', and 'In Paris with You'. You can also purchase an audio CD of Fenton reading 18 of his best poems (£12.99)

From the website: The Poetry Archive exists to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded.

'Jerusalem' (18 September 1996) -- The publishing house Farrar Straus Giroux celebrated its 50th birthday with an evening of readings by eleven poets at New York's Town Hall. Visit the New York Times website to listen to the poem (3 mins).

'The Milkfish Gatherers' (The film's director Jay Anania states: "In the late 80's I visited James on a small island just off a town called Infanta on the east coast of Luzon in the Philippines. This is where he had come across the milkfish gatherers.")

Fenton edits The New Faber Book of Love Poems

"James Fenton's The New Faber Book of Love Poems radically alters the mix of old standards: for instance, the selection of Kipling's love poems is sheer genius."-- Craig Raine (The Guardian)

The new edition celebrates love poetry originating in the English language, from Wyatt to the present day. It includes blues lyrics, American folk poetry, Elizabethan lyrics, Broadway songs, and a full range of poetic styles from the aristocratic to the popular. Eminently readable and engaging, The New Faber Book of Love Poems presents some of the most emotive and memorable lyric poems produced in the English language from the Renaissance to the present day.

Read James Fenton's 'Introduction' in full.

Read an interview with James Fenton from The Independent.

Lavinia Greenlaw. 'Fenton on Love.' Times Literary Supplement, 22 November 2006.

Fenton: Selected Poems

Fenton's Selected Poems is the first full selection of his poems to be published, and represents the whole range of his work from light-verse to political and love poems to opera libretti. It includes early work from The Memory of War and Children in Exile as well as later work from Out of Danger, which won the Whitbread Poetry Prize in 1994. Also represented are examples of his work in verse for the stage and recent unpublished poems.

Selected Poems
Penguin, 2006 / 224 pages
Farrar Straus Giroux / 192 pages

Visit www.penguin.co.uk or www.fsgbooks.com for more information or to order.

Front Row (BBC Radio 4) -- 13 June 2002

James Fenton discusses the state of British poetry with Front Row. Visit the Radio 4 website to listen to the conversation (9mins).

James Fenton's Poetry Masterclass

Over a period of several months, The Guardian ran excerpts from James Fenton's An Introduction to English Poetry. Read the articles on The Guardian website.

Articles & Essays
(Selected / In Progress ...)

'Of the Martian School.' New Statesman (20 October 1978): 520.

'The Manifesto against Manifestoes.' Poetry Review 73.3 (September 1983): 12-16.

'Yellow Tulips.' New York Review of Books 52.13 (11 August 2005): 9 [Poem].

'Secrets and Lives.' The Guardian (10 September 2005) [Biography and the clergyman poet George Crabbe].

"A Poke in the Eye with a Poem."The Guardian (21 October 2006) [Review of Horse Latitudes by Paul Muldoon].

'A Voice of His Own.' The Guardian (3 February 2007): 4 [Fenton on W. H. Auden].

'The Betrayal and the Brilliance.' The Guardian (22 February 2007): 7 [Fenton on W. H. Auden].

'Elizabeth Bishop's Christian Sin', The Times Literary Supplement (11 April 2007) [Bishop's 'The Unbeliever' & its source in Bunyan].

'The Need to Complete', The Guardian, 17 November 2007 [Fenton on need for a complete edition of the works of TS Eliot].

'Singing the Songs of Love', The Guardian, 15 December 2007 [Fenton on Spanish ballads].

'Jazzing Up Hazlitt', New York Review of Books 56.11 (2 July 2009) [Rev. of William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man, by Duncan Wu; New Writings of William Hazlitt, edited by Duncan Wu; and Hazlitt in Love: A Fatal Attachment, by Jon Cook]. Note: Full text access limited to subscribers or purchasers of the article.

'The Hounding of a Nobel Poet Has Shamed Oxford.' The Evening Standard (15 May 2009) [Fenton on Derek Walcott].

Critical Discussions
(Selected / In Progress ...)

Gitzen, Julian. 'A Tour of the Pitts-Rivers Museum.' Helix 17 (1984): 104-09 [The Memory of War].

Spender, Stephen. 'Politics and a Poet.' New Republic 190.20 (14 May 1984): 31 (3 pgs.) [Children in Exile: Poems 1968-1984].