Peter Porter Quotes

Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language

I have no fondness for pure form at all.

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.

In the New World, happiness is enforced.

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.

A professional is one who believes he has invented breathing.

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.

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

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

I am moving deeper into my own brain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.