Life & Wisdom Quote by Anne Stevenson

Stevenson’s line yanks poetry away from the misty pedestal of “pure emotion” and plants it in the brain. A poem, for her, isn’t a mood ring; it’s an act of scrutiny. “Thinking about feelings” is a quiet rebuke to the notion that lyric writing is just confession poured onto the page. The emphasis lands on “about”: not feelings performed, not feelings indulged, but feelings examined at arm’s length, turned like an object in the light.

The phrase also smuggles in a moral stance. “Human feelings and frailties” frames emotion as inseparable from limitation: jealousy, grief, desire, shame, tenderness, all tangled with the ways we fail and the ways we cope. Stevenson’s intent isn’t to medicalize the heart, but to insist that art begins where raw experience meets form, judgment, and honesty. A poem becomes a place where sentiment is tested against language, where the writer admits complexity instead of polishing it into slogans.

Context matters: Stevenson worked in a postwar, post-Confessional landscape that both prized emotional candor and distrusted its theatrics. Her own career often circled questions of restraint, clarity, and the ethics of representation. The subtext is almost a craft note: if you want to write “from feeling,” you still have to build the thinking that holds it. Otherwise you’re not making a poem; you’re just having a moment in public.