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"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."
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"One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry."

"A tough life needs a tough language-and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers-a language powerful enough to say how it is."

"I suppose that's how it looks in prose. But it's very different if you look at it through poetry and I think it's nicer' Anne recovered herself and her eyes shone and her cheeks flushed 'to look at it through poetry."

"The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?"

"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."

"A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion."

"The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness."

"Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production."
Explore more quotes by Peter Davison

"And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet."

"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."

"I just think that some version of the past in our culture is going to rise up and become dominant."

"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."

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