Anne Stevenson Quotes

Poetry is really a way of sharing feelings and ideas.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

I think poetry is able to say things in such a small, perfect way that are so hard to say. I think it's a perfect medium for expressing difficult ideas and concepts and feelings. It's one of my great loves.

There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.

I also write poems, so that is something that I really enjoy.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

What has always attracted me in life is poetry. Any genre can have poetry. For me, poetry contains truth.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet.

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.

The cliche is dead poetry.

Poetry is composing for the breath.

Poetry can tell us about what's going on in our lives - not only our personal but our social and political lives.

I was a serious poet for quite a while and had little notebooks filled with poetry.