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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
Poetry
Making
Poets
Ignore
Criticism
Poet

More quotes by Anne Stevenson

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My soul, how will I recognize you if we meet?
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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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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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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There's no friend like someone who has known you since you were five.
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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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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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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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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A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.
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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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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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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I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.
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 married a young Englishman in Cambridge in 1955 and have lived in Britain every since.
Anne Stevenson
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Blackbirds are the cellos of the deep farms.
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 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 like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.
Anne Stevenson