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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

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Anne Stevenson
Age: 87 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 3
Died: 2020
Died: September 14
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
Anne Katharine Stevenson
Language
Ground
Art
Meaning
Every
Quiet
Really
Poetry
Always
Asks
Meanings
Life
Word
Shy
Though
Multiple
Friends
Aware

More quotes by Anne Stevenson

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Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
Anne Stevenson
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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
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Blackbirds are the cellos of the deep farms.
Anne Stevenson
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My soul, how will I recognize you if we meet?
Anne Stevenson
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You've got criminal courts and child welfare officials refusing to do their jobs and protect children so they can shift the cases over to family court where predatory professionals can turn a dirty buck off the atrocities committed against children.
Anne Stevenson
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I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.
Anne Stevenson
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democracy is dying. We are ruled by faceless bureaucrats and lecherous puritans. ... You think about it. 'All right for me but not for you' is their philosophy.
Anne Stevenson
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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
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There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.
Anne Stevenson
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When everything is for 'fun' nothing is for the good.
Anne Stevenson
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I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.
Anne Stevenson
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There comes a time when you have to trust your own judgment, when you must close your eyes and let your instinct rule you.
Anne Stevenson
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I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won't live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century.
Anne Stevenson
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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
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I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.
Anne Stevenson
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There's no friend like someone who has known you since you were five.
Anne Stevenson
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Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.
Anne Stevenson
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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
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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
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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