Peter Neville Frederick Porter OAM (16 February 1929 – 23 April 2010) was a British-based Australian poet.

[2] He married Jannice Henry, a nurse from Marlow, Buckinghamshire, in 1961 and they had two daughters (born in 1962 and 1965).

[3][4] Jannice committed suicide in 1974, greatly affecting Porter's work, in particular The Cost of Seriousness.

Porter died on 23 April 2010, aged 81, after suffering from liver cancer for a year.

[8] The publication of his poem Metamorphosis in The Times Literary Supplement in January 1960 brought his work to a wider audience.

In a recorded conversation with his friend Clive James he stated that theglory of present-day English writing in America, in Australia and in Britain, is what is left over of the old regular metrical pattern and how that can be adapted to the new sense that the main element, the main fixture of poetry is no longer the foot (you know, the iambus or the trochee) but the cadence.