PETER PORTER

Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language

A poem is a form of refrigeration that stops language going bad.

Writing poetry is the only form of literary labour which gives me entire satisfaction.

Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.

You can never tell when an artist really will take up someone's work and work with it happily.

Redeemers always reach the world too late. God dies, we live; God lives, we die. Our fate.

Somewhere at the heart of the universe sounds the true mystic note: Me.

Love without sex is still the most efficient form of hell known to man.

It is Australian innocence to love The naturally excessive and be proud Of a thoroughbred gelding who ran fast.

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

You can never tell when an artist really will take up someone's work and work with it happily.

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

In other words the pictures are in a kind of relationship with each other which is touching only at points rather than pictures being illustrations of poems or poems extrapolations of the pictures.

As to whether the people who were supposedly to put up the money and did put it up or whether it was Arthur's own money is something which I shall never know.

I wanted to take a stand against what I think was not so well established then but is thoroughly well established now, which is the substitution for a real sense of a country of a hideous distortion which you can sell to the people called 'heritage'.

I have no fondness for pure form at all.

Love without sex is still the most efficient form of hell known to man.

I am moving deeper into my own brain.

A poem is a form of refrigeration that stops language going bad.

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold for which I thank the Paddington and Westminster Public Libraries.

We cannot know what John of Leyden felt Under the Bishop 's tongs - we can only Walk in temperate London, our educated city, Wishing to cry as freely as they did who died In the Age of Faith. We have our loneliness And our regret with which to build an eschatology.

Redeemers always reach the world too late. God dies, we live; God lives, we die. Our fate.

Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.

An old art spreading rumours about / Paradise, it begs outside the gates / Of the gods: the active gods come out.

It is Australian innocence to love The naturally excessive and be proud Of a thoroughbred gelding who ran fast.

In the New World, happiness is enforced.

Writing poetry is the only form of literary labour which gives me entire satisfaction.

Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language

A professional is one who believes he has invented breathing.

Somewhere at the heart of the universe sounds the true mystic note: Me.