Peter Porter (poet)

Peter Porter in 2007

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.