Anne Stevenson Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

A hobbyhorse can be a tiring ride for nonenthusiasts.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Blackbirds are the cellos of the deep farms.

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

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.

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

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