Art & Creativity Quote by Peter Davison

Davison smuggles a practical acting note into what sounds like a gentle defense of verse: you don’t “get” poetry by decoding it like a puzzle, you get it by stocking your mind with the stuff poetry is made of. “The more poetry you have in the head” isn’t just about reading more. It’s about building an internal library of rhythms, images, and emotional moves so that when a poem swerves, you recognize the turn in your bones. That’s an actor’s way of reading: understanding as muscle memory, not mere interpretation.

The subtext pushes back against the anxious modern habit of treating poems as gated cultural property. Davison implies that difficulty is often a lack of exposure, not a lack of intelligence. If you’ve absorbed enough poetry, you stop asking, “What does this mean?” and start asking, “Why did they choose this sound, this pause, this metaphor right now?” Comprehension becomes empathy with the writer’s pressures.

His second clause is the real tell: “getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.” The point isn’t reverence for a canon; it’s curiosity about motive. People write poems when ordinary language can’t carry the load - grief, desire, awe, boredom, rage. Davison’s actor background matters here: actors are trained to locate intention beneath text, to hear subtext between lines. He’s arguing that poetry literacy is a feedback loop. The more you internalize the form, the more you can feel the human need that produced it, and that recognition is what makes the next poem legible.