Anne Stevenson Quotes

I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

I married a young Englishman in Cambridge in 1955 and have lived in Britain every since.

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.

Blackbirds are the cellos of the deep farms.

I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.

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.

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.

I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

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.

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.

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.

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

I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.

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.

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.

I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won't live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century.

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.

When everything is for 'fun' nothing is for the good.

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.

A hobbyhorse can be a tiring ride for nonenthusiasts.

The sea is as near as we come to another world.

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.

There comes a time when you have to trust your own judgment, when you must close your eyes and let your instinct rule you.

There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.

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.

There's no friend like someone who has known you since you were five.

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.

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.