Peter Davison

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Poetry is composing for the breath.”

“Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.”

“Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.”

“Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.”

“They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.”

“The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.”

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

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

“But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.”

“There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.”

“It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.”