Peter Porter (poet)



Peter Neville Frederick Porter (16 February 1929 – 23 April 2010) was an Australian-born poet and critic who lived for most of his adult life in Britain. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2002, and the Royal Society of Literature made him a Companion of Literature in 2007.

Sourced

 * 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.
 * "The Historians Call Up Pain", first collected in Once Bitten, Twice Bitten (1961); cited from Edward Lucie-Smith and Philip Hobsbaum (eds.) A Group Anthology (London: Oxford University Press, 1963) p. 83.


 * In the New World, happiness is enforced.
 * "In the New World Happiness is Allowed", in The Cost of Seriousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) p. 28.


 * In Australia Inter alia, Mediocrities Think they’re Socrates.
 * Quoted in Charles Osborne Giving It Away (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986) p. 114.


 * Redeemers always reach the world too late. God dies, we live; God lives, we die. Our fate.
 * "A Tale of Two Pieties", in The Chair of Babel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) p. 51.

The Last of England (1970)
Quotations are cited from the 1st edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).


 * Language of the liberal dead speaks From the soil of Highgate, tears Show a great water table is intact. You cannot leave England, it turns A planet majestically in the mind.
 * "The Last of England", p. 1.


 * Much have I travelled in the realms of gold for which I thank the Paddington and Westminster Public Libraries.
 * "The Sanitized Sonnets: 4", p. 41.


 * A professional is one who believes he has invented breathing.
 * "Japanese Jokes", p. 62.


 * Somewhere at the heart of the universe sounds the true mystic note: Me.
 * "Japanese Jokes", p. 63.