BOSTON (AP) – Peter Davison, a poetry editor for The Atlantic Monthly magazine and two publishing houses who became a poet himself, has died. He was 76.

Davison, a central figure in Boston’s literary and publishing circles for almost 50 years, died yesterday in his Boston apartment of pancreatic cancer, The Boston Globe reported.

Davison was The Atlantic Monthly’s poetry editor for three decades. He was with The Atlantic Monthly Press from 1956 until he joined the Houghton Mifflin publishing house in 1985.

He also wrote 11 volumes of poetry and three prose works, including “The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston from Robert Frost to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath.” The work included his personal remembrances of Frost, a mentor to Davison; Lowell, who was a friend, and Plath, with whom he had a brief romantic relationship.

“Peter was an extraordinary link to The Atlantic’s and the country’s literary history,” Cullen Murphy, the magazine’s managing editor, told the Globe.

“But he was not some antiquarian – he was a robustly modern man with aggressive appetites, always on the lookout for new things worth saying and new people to say them.”

Davison is survived by his second wife, Boston architect Joan E. Goody; a son, a daughter, four grandchildren and a sister. His first wife, Jane Truslow Davison, died in 1981.

Davison began writing his own poetry in 1957. His first published volume, “The Breaking of the Day,” was the prestigious Yale Younger Poets award.

His poetry was reflective, as he expressed in a 1984 work, “Peripheral Vision” :

“The corner of the eye/Is where my visions lie.”

He wrote about the two occupations of his life in a 25th anniversary report to his class at Harvard University, where he graduated in 1949.

“Without publishing I could not make a living nor lead an active life; without poetry I could not survive as an inner man. I love them both as some men I suppose can simultaneously cherish a wife and a mistress,” he wrote.

Among the authors he edited were Ward Just, Farley Mowat, William Least Heat-Moon, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and Robert Coles.

Davison was born in New York and grew up in Boulder, Colo., where his father, a poet and educator, taught at the University of Colorado. Through his father he met literary giants such at Frost, Ford Madox Ford and Robert Penn Warren.

After graduating from Harvard, he spent a year as a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University, then took at job at the New York publishing company Harcourt, Brace. In 1955 he became assistant to the director at Harvard University Press, and joined the Atlantic Monthly press a year later.