Time & Perspective Quote by Peter Davison

Davison’s line lands like a quiet defense of art as a tool for personal editing: not rewriting history, but re-seeing it. Coming from an actor, it reads less like a theorist’s manifesto and more like a working performer describing the difference between telling a story and inhabiting one. Prose is built for clarity and causality; it likes to pin events down, to make them legible. Poetry, he suggests, is what you reach for when the past won’t sit still.

The intent is practical and a little tender: poetry lets you revisit memory without forcing it into a clean narrative. It can hold contradiction, shame, nostalgia, and the blank spots we all carry. The subtext is that reassessment isn’t only intellectual; it’s sensory. Poetry makes room for rhythm, omission, repetition, and image - the same tools actors use to convey what a character can’t say outright. Where prose can feel like testimony, poetry can feel like a relapse, a confession, a flashback, a spell.

Contextually, Davison is speaking from a profession that lives on subtext. Acting is essentially prose on the page turned into poetry on the body: pauses, breath, emphasis, silence. His point flatters poetry, but it also critiques our cultural obsession with explainability. Some parts of the past don’t want explanation; they want a form that admits uncertainty and still calls it truth.