Peter Davison Quotes on Literature (25 Quotes)

Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.

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 they want to know anything about poetry, they simply have to go out and learn it.

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.

There are some poets, and some of the good ones, who really act as careerists and go out and make a career, make sure they're well regarded.

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

The relation between a poet and audience is really insignificant. What matters is the poet is hearing something that he is broadcasting. And whether there is anybody with a receiver isn't the reason he does it. He hopes there is somebody receiving it.

There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.

I would like to be proud of having written some poems that will be remembered, but I will never know whether I will have any reason to be proud of that.

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.

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.

If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.

For instance, it's a little better now than it was two or three years ago, but something like 70% of the poems I receive seem to be written in the present indicative.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

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.

However, in 1950 there might have been 150 books of poetry published in a year. In 1997, there are probably about 1,500.

Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.

And one of the odd things about it is that poetry is now fleeing from the academies to another institution, which is the performance poetry.

Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

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.

People who deliver their work in poetry slams have a lot of vitality, and they are more dramatic than the institutionalacademic poets.

Poetry is composing for the breath.

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.