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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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Anne Stevenson
Age: 87 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 3
Died: 2020
Died: September 14
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
Anne Katharine Stevenson
Canvas
Violent
Poetry
Words
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More quotes by 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
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
Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.
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
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
I married a young Englishman in Cambridge in 1955 and have lived in Britain every since.
Anne Stevenson
When everything is for 'fun' nothing is for the good.
Anne Stevenson
A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.
Anne Stevenson
There's no friend like someone who has known you since you were five.
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
Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
Anne Stevenson
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
My soul, how will I recognize you if we meet?
Anne Stevenson
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
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
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
Blackbirds are the cellos of the deep farms.
Anne Stevenson
I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won't live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century.
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
I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.
Anne Stevenson