He earned a Ph.D. in English from Stanford University in 1973, where he studied with the poet and literary critics Yvor Winters and Donald Davie.
[1] The final chapter of literary critic Robert Archambeau's book Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry is devoted to Peck's life and work.
Other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy in Rome, an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, AGNI’s Anne Sexton Poetry Award, and the first annual Thomas McGrath Prize in poetry.
Speaking to the relationship between his analytical work and his writing, Peck has said that “Jung’s psychology has deepened my respect for the gap between framing an intuition in words and actually taking in what the larger personality would have one incorporate.” Along with Mark Kyburz, Peck was co-translator of Jung's The Red Book and Luigi Zoja’s Cultivating the Soul (2005).
[3] Peck co-edited Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1941, published by Princeton University Press in 2014, and is currently one of the main editors for the Philemon Foundation.