Quotes from 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

I have no fondness for pure form at all.

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

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'.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.

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.

I am only the image I can force upon the town.

Answers to all the problems that there are, Except the love that kills, the death that lives.