A biography for Peter Davisonhasn’t been written yet.
“My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.”
“But there is some way in which poets believe that and this is dangerous, too believe that their calling gives them a certain freedom. A certain freedom to live in a free way.”
“But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.”
“But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.”
“It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.”
“If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.”
“I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.”
“The problem, for me, with the writing programs is that they produce a terrible uniformity of product.”
“And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.”
“The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.”
“If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.”
“I like poems that are complex.”
“The trouble with the performance poets is that they don't seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work.”
“The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.”
“They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.”
“I like poems that are little games.”
“Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.”
“Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.”
“Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.”
“I just think that some version of the past in our culture is going to rise up and become dominant.”