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Peter Davison was a poet, essayist, teacher, lecturer, editor, and publisher. Peter was the poetry editor of The Atlantic Monthly for thirty years.
Peter settled in Boston in 1955, at the age of twenty-seven. He was lured by a job at Harvard University Press, and quickly went on to a distinguished publishing career at the Atlantic Monthly Press and at Houghton Mifflin. The Boston where Peter took root, he would later recall, was “one of the most exciting milieus for poetry in the history of this country,” and his circle in those early years included Robert Lowell and Robert Frost, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, Richard Wilbur and Donald Hall. It is a world that lives on in verse and in Peter’s 1994 book The Fading Smile, a collection of sharp literary sketches that is also part memoir and part anthology (and, in the bargain, one of the best introductions to how poetry is made and why it matters).
—By Cullen Murphy, The Atlantic Monthly
Recommended Reading
The Poems of Peter Davison, 1957-1995 by Peter Davison (1997).
