James Fenton’s poetry grew from an unusual conjunction: close attention to language and sustained contact with political events. An English poet, journalist and literary critic, he reported from Vietnam and Cambodia during the 1970s, and his writing brought the pressures of history into verse. His career has ranged from prize-winning early poems to journalism, lectures on poetry, music and theatre, and a long-standing engagement with the work of W. H. Auden.
Lincoln, Oxford and an early prize
Fenton was born in Lincoln on 25 April 1949 and grew up in Lincolnshire and Staffordshire. His father, Canon John Fenton, was a biblical scholar. He attended Durham Choristers School and Repton before going to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1970.
At school, Fenton developed an enthusiasm for Auden’s work. At Oxford, his tutor John Fuller encouraged that interest; Auden would become a particularly significant influence on Fenton’s writing. The distinction matters: Fenton studied with Fuller, rather than with Auden, as an earlier account had claimed.
In his first year at Oxford, Fenton won the Newdigate Prize for Our Western Furniture, a sonnet sequence later published by Fuller’s Sycamore Press. Its subject was the cultural encounter between the United States and Japan in the nineteenth century. The sequence already joined formal control to an interest in what happens when cultures meet. Exempla, later included in The Memory of War, continued his attention to the possibilities of language, including familiar words used in unfamiliar ways.
His first collection, Terminal Moraine, appeared in 1972 and won a Gregory Award. He used the proceeds to travel in East Asia. His writing there took in the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam and the end of the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia, before the rise of Pol Pot. The poems gathered in The Memory of War (1982) established his reputation as a war poet.
Reporting, politics and the poems of war
Fenton worked in journalism as well as poetry. He became assistant literary editor of the New Statesman in 1971 and editorial assistant in 1972, later serving as the magazine’s political correspondent. He wrote for Socialist Worker early in his journalistic career and was involved with the International Socialists. His political commitments, and subsequent second thoughts about revolutionary socialism, form part of the perspective explored in his later reportage.
He reported from Vietnam during the final phase of the war, which ended in 1975, and his experiences in Vietnam and Cambodia from 1973 informed All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim (1988). The book’s account of political journeys and changing convictions gives a prose counterpart to the poems’ engagement with conflict. Fenton returned to London in 1976. Between 1978 and 1980, he spent a year in West Berlin reporting for The Guardian.
Other journeys also entered his writing. In 1983, he travelled to Borneo with his friend Redmond O’Hanlon; O’Hanlon’s book Into the Heart of Borneo describes the voyage. Fenton’s work across poetry and reportage resists a simple division between public events and literary subject matter: places, encounters and political changes were part of the material he considered as a writer.
Collections, criticism and the stage
Children in Exile: Poems 1968–1984 won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1984. Fenton received the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 1994 for Out of Danger, which he considered his second collection. It brought together Manila Envelope and later poems. His 2012 book Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968–2011 is a collection spanning decades of work, rather than a single poem as the title has sometimes been presented.
Fenton’s interests have extended well beyond collections of verse. He wrote art essays for The New York Review of Books, gathered in Leonardo’s Nephew (1998), and published The Strength of Poetry (2001), based on his Oxford lectures. His books also include School of Genius: A History of the Royal Academy of Arts (2006), as well as theatre reviews and an introduction to English poetry.
His writing has also met music and theatre. The American composer Charles Wuorinen set several of Fenton’s poems to music, and Fenton wrote the libretto for Wuorinen’s opera Haroun and the Sea of Stories, based on Salman Rushdie’s novel. Fenton was the original English librettist for the musical Les Misérables; Cameron Mackintosh later replaced him with Herbert Kretzmer. Kretzmer credited Fenton with creating the adaptation’s general structure, and Fenton is credited with additional lyrics under his contract.
Teaching, honours and a continuing literary presence
In 1994 Fenton became Oxford Professor of Poetry, a post he held until 1999. His appointment brought the work of a poet with experience of journalism and political reporting into a university role devoted to poetry. He later published The Strength of Poetry from his Oxford lectures. Fenton has also contributed frequently to The Guardian, The Independent and The New York Review of Books, and wrote a Friday editorial column for the Evening Standard.
His honours include the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2007 and the PEN Pinter Prize in 2015, which he shared with Raif Badawi. Earlier recognition included the Newdigate Prize, the Eric Gregory Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983 and later received an honorary fellowship from Magdalen College, Oxford.
Fenton has resisted the idea that poets should produce work to a regular schedule. Reflecting on the comparatively slim Selected Poems published in 2006, he argued against the expectation that poets should churn out poems in an automated fashion. That view sits alongside a body of work spanning poems, essays, journalism, lectures and theatrical writing: varied forms, but a consistent seriousness about what language can do.
Why James Fenton deserves a place in British Legacy
James Fenton’s place in British literary history rests on more than a reputation for political poetry. His career connects the country’s university and publishing worlds with events beyond Britain: he wrote as a poet and journalist about Vietnam and Cambodia, and turned those experiences into work that considered war, political change and the limits of ideological certainty. The Memory of War and All the Wrong Places show how poetry and reportage can offer distinct ways of attending to the same unsettled history.
His contribution is also visible in the range of forms through which he has worked. Fenton has written collections, criticism, art history, lectures and theatre, and has collaborated with a composer and contributed to the development of Les Misérables. As Oxford Professor of Poetry, he held a significant British academic post; as a regular contributor to British publications, he brought poetry and criticism into public discussion. These are specific ways in which his work has enriched British cultural life: extending the subjects poetry can confront, keeping literary criticism in circulation and carrying the craft of verse into other forms. His British connection is grounded in the institutions, publications and literary tradition in which he has worked, while his writing’s reach has never been confined to Britain.
Sources
Adapted in part from James Fenton by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.