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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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Anne Stevenson
Age: 87 †
Born: 1933
Born: January 3
Died: 2020
Died: September 14
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
Anne Katharine Stevenson
Life
Late
Cooperate
Though
Pattern
Family
Useless
Order
Patterns
Without
Rules
Made
Tried
Believe
However
Always
Poetry

More quotes by 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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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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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 remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.
Anne Stevenson
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There comes a time when you have to trust your own judgment, when you must close your eyes and let your instinct rule you.
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 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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Blackbirds are the cellos of the deep farms.
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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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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I married a young Englishman in Cambridge in 1955 and have lived in Britain every since.
Anne Stevenson
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A hobbyhorse can be a tiring ride for nonenthusiasts.
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 don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.
Anne Stevenson
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Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
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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A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.
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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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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There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.
Anne Stevenson