Words matter. These are the best Anne Stevenson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn’t otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me.
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’ve cancelled all my subscriptions to poetry magazines. I prefer to read the ‘New Scientist.’
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.
Many varieties of sonnet, of course, have been written over the ages.
A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings – about human feelings and frailties.
I married a young Englishman in Cambridge in 1955 and have lived in Britain every since.
There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.
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.
I truly hate marketing promotions, and I don’t at all approve of encouraging wannabe poets to write bad poetry.
I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.
Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don’t ignore feelings and emotions.
I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won’t live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century.
Have you ever heard of a pianist who never had to practice – or of an architect who didn’t bother to find out why buildings stand up?
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.
Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
