James Fenton 
James Fenton is a political journalist, war correspondent and poet. He edited The New Faber Book of Love Poems and D. H. Lawrence's Selected Poems, and has authored six volumes of poetry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2007 was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Links to other texts about James Fenton
Critical Reviews
Stephen Metcalf, a critic for Slate, uncovers the menace lurking beneath the "jaunty" surface of Fenton's poetry.
"The English poet James Fenton has survived the specter of his own immense promise... Fenton remains an extraordinary poet with something original to disclose. The publication of his Selected Poems gives American readers an excuse to lay encomiums aside and discover Fenton for themselves."
Longtime BBC commentator, author, and poet, Dana Gioia considers James Fenton's contributions to the poetry of our time.
"James Fenton's rapid rise to literary fame in the 1980s served as a climax to the emergence of a new generation of English poets… Fenton represented to many critics the best qualities of the new wave of poets. In Seamus Heaney's canny description, the young poets were 'highly self-conscious . . . anticonfessional, detached, laconic, and strangely popular considering their various devices for keeping the reader at arm's length.' Fenton's literary importance, however, ultimately transcended his position as herald to a new generation. While the exuberant energy and consummate assurance of both tone and technique immediately distinguished his work, his qualities were in no way superficial. He was unsurpassed among his contemporaries in terms of range, skill, and intelligence, but it was ultimately the sheer excellence of his poetry that gradually but ineluctably earned him the position of the major British poet of his generation."
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