Peter Davison

It’s not entirely clear which Peter Davison you meant (because there are multiple notable people by that name), so I'll provide you with two major figures named Peter Davison and you can tell me which one you were referring to (or whether you meant a different one).

Peter Davison (English Actor)

Basic Info & Early Life

  • Full name: Peter Malcolm Gordon Moffett (born 13 April 1951)

  • Place of birth: Streatham, London, England

  • Later, his family moved to Knaphill, Surrey (Woking area) during his youth.

  • He adopted the stage name Peter Davison (rather than his birth name Moffett) to avoid confusion with another actor/director named Peter Moffatt.

  • Education: He studied acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

Career Highlights

  • He is best known for playing Tristan Farnon in All Creatures Great and Small (BBC adaptation) beginning in 1978.

  • He gained wide fame for portraying the Fifth Doctor in Doctor Who from 1981 to 1984.

  • After his time as the Doctor, he continued acting in many TV dramas, comedies, and theatre productions.

  • He has also reprised the role of the Fifth Doctor in audio dramas and special appearances in later Doctor Who media.

Personal Life

  • He has been married three times: first to Diane J. Russell (short marriage), then to actress Sandra Dickinson (married 1978, later divorced), and later to Elizabeth Morton (in 2003).

  • He is the father of Georgia Tennant (née Moffett), who is married to actor David Tennant (another Doctor Who actor).

Peter Davison (American Poet & or)

Another well-known person named Peter Davison was an American poet and literary editor.

Basic Info & Early Life

  • Born: June 27, 1928, in New York City

  • Died: December 29, 2004, in Boston, Massachusetts

  • His father, Edward Davison, was a Scottish poet and professor.

  • He grew up partly in Boulder, Colorado, because of his father’s academic work.

Education & Career

  • He studied at Harvard University, graduating in 1949.

  • He spent a year at Cambridge University on a Fulbright Fellowship.

  • He worked as an editor and publisher—most notably serving as poetry editor for The Atlantic Monthly for many years.

  • He published numerous collections of poetry (e.g. The Breaking of the Day, Breathing Room) and also memoirs such as Half Remembered: A Personal History.

If you tell me which Peter Davison you meant (the actor, the poet, or someone else), I can write a full, SEO-optimized article tailored to that person.

Articles by the author

I like poems that are little games.

Peter Davison

Poetry is composing for the breath.

Peter Davison

My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they're embarrassed that I write it or they're embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.

Peter Davison

Poetry should be able to reach everybody, and it should be able to appeal to all levels of understanding.

Peter Davison

They need to learn poetry. They don't need to learn about poetry. They don't need to be told how to interpret poetry. They don't need to be told how to understand poetry. They need to learn it.

Peter Davison

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.

Peter Davison

But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.

Peter Davison

There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.

Peter Davison

I think poetry has lost an awful lot of its muscle because nobody knows any. Nobody has to memorize poetry.

Peter Davison

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.

Peter Davison

Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.

Peter Davison

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry, as such.

Peter Davison

The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

Peter Davison

And there are a lot more people reading poetry, but there are not so many people reading an individual poet.

Peter Davison

It is a way we reassess our past. We can do that in poetry in ways we can't do in prose.

Peter Davison