Anne Stevenson Quotes

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

Blackbirds are the cellos of the deep farms.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.