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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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Anne Stevenson
Age: 87 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 3
Died: 2020
Died: September 14
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
Anne Katharine Stevenson
Never
Survived
Literary
Academic
Criticism
Wrong
Much
Kind

More quotes by 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
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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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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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Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.
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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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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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
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A hobbyhorse can be a tiring ride for nonenthusiasts.
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 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
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I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.
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
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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 don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.
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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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 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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Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
Anne Stevenson