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Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

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
Criticism
Poet
Poetry
Making
Poets
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More quotes by Anne Stevenson

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I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.
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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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'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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Blackbirds are the cellos of the deep farms.
Anne Stevenson
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I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.
Anne Stevenson
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A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.
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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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
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I married a young Englishman in Cambridge in 1955 and have lived in Britain every since.
Anne Stevenson
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When everything is for 'fun' nothing is for the good.
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 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
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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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The sea is as near as we come to another world.
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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Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.
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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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
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There's no friend like someone who has known you since you were five.
Anne Stevenson