Peter Davison Quotes

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986.

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

Jim wanted to be known as a poet, first and foremost.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems.

When I discovered the lyric poem, that advanced not by narrative steps but by blocks and layers of imagery, I said, 'Gee, I probably could do that. So let me try that.'

I shall, in due time, be a Poet.

Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.

I've been writing poetry seriously since about 2008, 2009.

Find a poet whose style you like, emulate that style, then deal with things that you know about - don't waste your time looking for your own style.' I wish I could remember who told me that, because I'd like to congraulate him. I've emulated all the old guys - Tennyson, Alexander Pope.

I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.'

I am still interested in the long or serial poem, but have written a few smaller things. I may start sending to journals again in a year or so... that's about it.

Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.

Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.