Peter Porter Quotes & Sayings

You can never tell when an artist really will take up someone's work and work with it happily. — Peter Porter

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold for which I thank the Paddington and Westminster Public Libraries. — Peter Porter

A poem is a form of refrigeration that stops language going bad. — Peter Porter

Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not. — Peter Porter

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene. — Peter Porter

Shakespeare's ambiguous lubricity in Venus is less disturbing than the bleakly moral emphasis of Lucrece, where virtue is so low-spirited, its exclamation so lachrymose and its justification the nasty realpolitik of Roman Republicanism. The sun has not dried the dew on the grass in Venus, but the ill-lit world of Livy's Rome darkens Lucrece. The first poem lives out of doors; the second is in a permanent chiaroscuro. — Peter Porter

Redeemers always reach the world too late. God dies, we live; God lives, we die. Our fate. — Peter Porter

Writing poetry is the only form of literary labour which gives me entire satisfaction. — Peter Porter

We cannot know what John of Leyden felt Under the Bishop 's tongs - we can only Walk in temperate London, our educated city, Wishing to cry as freely as they did who died In the Age of Faith. We have our loneliness And our regret with which to build an eschatology. — Peter Porter

As to whether the people who were supposedly to put up the money and did put it up or whether it was Arthur's own money is something which I shall never know. — Peter Porter

In the New World, happiness is enforced. — Peter Porter

I wanted to take a stand against what I think was not so well established then but is thoroughly well established now, which is the substitution for a real sense of a country of a hideous distortion which you can sell to the people called 'heritage'. — Peter Porter

I am moving deeper into my own brain. — Peter Porter

A professional is one who believes he has invented breathing. — Peter Porter

Love without sex is still the most efficient form of hell known to man. — Peter Porter

The Arden Shakespeare is intended both as a student text and as a revision of traditional scholarship. If it is to be used in the first way, then the often narrow thread of text above a sediment of footnotes, something Dr Leavis so deplored, can prove debilitating. Poems, especially the classics of our language, should be read headlong. Dubieties may be looked up later. — Peter Porter

Somewhere at the heart of the universe sounds the true mystic note: Me. — Peter Porter

I have no fondness for pure form at all. — Peter Porter

It is Australian innocence to love The naturally excessive and be proud Of a thoroughbred gelding who ran fast. — Peter Porter

Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language — Peter Porter

In other words the pictures are in a kind of relationship with each other which is touching only at points rather than pictures being illustrations of poems or poems extrapolations of the pictures. — Peter Porter

An old art spreading rumours about / Paradise, it begs outside the gates / Of the gods: the active gods come out. — Peter Porter