Peter Davison Quotes

I've always been - as a teacher, as graduate student, as a student, and I think, really, as a child - I've been interested in poems, but not so much for what the take home pay is, what you might sum up from them in moral or intellectual terms or whatever, but what's in the certain lines and how lines relates to other lines.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

I was lucky to have read a lot of poetry when I was younger; it helped me to remember a way to write.

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

It's not easy to define poetry.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

I like poems that are complex.

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, Student of our sweet English tongue, I never indulge in poetics - Unless I am down with rheumatics.

A definition of poetry can only determine what poetry should be and not what poetry actually was and is; otherwise the most concise formula would be: Poetry is that which at some time and some place was thus named.

There was a period in my life when I was very young that I wrote a sonnet a day just to learn concision in writing.

I tell you, once a girl's got a dose of novels she's a pushover for iambic pentameter.

I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.

I think poetry is a fabulous medium to encapsulate thoughts far more precisely than prose.

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

Poetry is something I love to do. Good poetry has an amazing ability to be communicative before it's even understood. I get emotional just from the beauty of words.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.