Anne Stevenson Quotes

Form is endlessly interesting to me, and I love poetry as a formal enterprise.

I love playing with words and texture.

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

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.

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

I hear a little firecracker go off when you come up with a good rhyme.

I love an imperfect rhyme.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

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.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

I've always loved rhyming. I love language.

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

You just go where poetry is, whether it's in your heart or your mind or in books or in places where there's live poetry or recordings.

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

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.