James Fenton's rapid rise to literary fame in the early 1980s served as a climax to the emergence of a new generation of poets brought to wide attention by the publication of two influential and compe...
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Critical Essay by Julian Symons
['Our Western Furniture', one of the poems in Terminal Moraine], is an astonishing piece of work. Fenton's theme is the commercial opening-up of Ja...
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Critical Essay by Julian Symons
There are three poetic Fentons, two of comparatively minor interest. One offers botanical, psychological or medical "exempla" taken from books or other pr...
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Critical Essay by Stephen Spender
James Fenton is a brilliant poet of great technical virtuosity. His poetry is plunged in the real life of the kind that we see on television screens, read about in th...
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Critical Essay by Douglas Dunn
Fenton works for the front half of the New Statesman, and is said by the blurb to be a member of International Socialism. He has kept this from the part of him that writ...
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Critical Essay by Craig Raine
[In A Vacant Possession, Fenton's] starting point is Auden's statement: 'Present in every human being are two desires, a desire to know the truth abo...
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Critical Essay by Lawrence Sail
All five poems in James Fenton's A Vacant Possession show the expertise evident in his first collection, Terminal Moraine—but the mood is very different. ...
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Critical Essay by Peter Porter
[Fenton] projects force and conviction …, and has done so since his earliest poems appeared at the beginning of the Seventies. After 'Terminal Moraine�...
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Critical Essay by Michael Carlson
The impact of James Fenton's best poems comes from the surprise of encountering the unexpected within his otherwise careful formal strategies. This seeming con...
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Critical Essay by Jonathan Raban
Fenton is as clever and ingenious as anyone around, but he is alone among his contemporaries in having a great deal to write about. He has all the civil virtues, the w...
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Critical Essay by Hilary Spurling
The best British theatre critics have generally been, like James Fenton (who [in You Were Marvellous] is clearly offering himself for judgment only by the highest sta...
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Critical Essay by Arnold Wesker
[This essay was originally published in The Listener, August 25, 1983.]
James Fenton's nature doesn't appear to be vindictive, though wiser playwrights wo...
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James Martin Fenton
