Anne Stevenson Quotes
"A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Feelings, Thinking)
"I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Marriage, Poetry, Tragedy, Years)
"I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Art, Science, Criticism, Help, Jargon, Literary, Literature)
"I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Poetry, Words)
"I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life - though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Life, Poetry, Family, Order, Rules)
"I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Work, Ideas)
"I married a young Englishman in Cambridge in 1955 and have lived in Britain every since."
- Anne Stevenson
"I play with language a great deal in my poems, and I enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated but I hope real emotions as simply as possible. But that doesn't mean the poems are simple, just that they are as truthful as I can make them."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Hope, Emotions, Language, Play, Poems)
"Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Poems, Weight, Word)
"I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson."
- Anne Stevenson
"Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: American, Books, Favorite)
"I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Meditation)
"I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Art, Life, Poetry, Language, Meaning, Quiet, Word)
"My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Confusion, Melancholy, Poems, Today)
"Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Time, Sister, Children, Mountains, Writer)
"Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Poetry, Criticism, Poets)
"Sylvia Plath was just a month and a half older than I, and when she committed suicide I was only 30 - and very shocked and sorry. I never knew her personally."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Suicide)
"There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Criticism, Literary, Wrong)
"When everything is for 'fun' nothing is for the good."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Nothing)
"Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Feelings, Hope, Emotions, Mind, Poems)
"I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Music, Literature, Shakespeare)
"I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won't live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century."
- Anne Stevenson
(Related: Now)