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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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Anne Stevenson
Age: 87 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 3
Died: 2020
Died: September 14
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
Anne Katharine Stevenson
Seventies
Glad
Horror
Century
Rather
Live
Come
Horrors
Really
Seventy
More quotes by Anne Stevenson
My soul, how will I recognize you if we meet?
Anne Stevenson
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
Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.
Anne Stevenson
I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.
Anne Stevenson
Blackbirds are the cellos of the deep farms.
Anne Stevenson
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
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
I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.
Anne Stevenson
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
The sea is as near as we come to another world.
Anne Stevenson
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
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
Mind led body to the edge of the precipice. They stared in desire at the naked abyss. If you love me, said mind, take that step into silence. If you love me, said body, turn and exist.
Anne Stevenson
There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.
Anne Stevenson
Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.
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
There's no friend like someone who has known you since you were five.
Anne Stevenson
I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.
Anne Stevenson
Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
Anne Stevenson
I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound.
Anne Stevenson
