top of page
"Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Poetry quotes

"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

"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."

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

"People are talking about the Internet as though it is going to change the world. It's not going to change the world. It's not going to change the way we think, and it's not going to change the way we feel."

"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."

"The problem, for me, with the writing programs is that they produce a terrible uniformity of product."

"My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence."

"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."

"In order to understand what they need to understand, in order to write what they write, they have to be free. And yet, they aren't ever free. They are not free because they are not free of the constrictions their art puts on them."
bottom of page