Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Davison

“I like poems that are complex” reads like a modest preference, but it’s really a small declaration of taste as self-portrait. Coming from an actor, it’s less about academic difficulty and more about appetite for layered experience. Actors spend their lives inside subtext: the line that lands isn’t the line that’s spoken, it’s the tension under it. So “complex” signals a craving for the same thing in poetry - work that doesn’t flatten emotion into a slogan, that leaves room for contradiction, misdirection, and private meanings that only click on the second or third pass.

There’s also a quiet resistance here to the cultural demand that art be instantly legible. In an era that rewards hot takes and caption-ready wisdom, “complex” is a flag for patience: poems that make you slow down, reread, argue with them, feel a little stupid before you feel something sharper. That’s not snobbery so much as a defense of depth. Complexity implies a trust that the audience can handle ambiguity - and a desire to be treated as someone who can.

The subtext is aspirational too. Saying you like complex poems aligns you with a certain kind of seriousness without needing to name influences or prove expertise. It’s a soft flex, but also a sincere one: a performer admitting that what moves him isn’t the neat payoff, it’s the messier, more human architecture underneath.