Politics & Power Quote by Anne Stevenson

A poet naming her saints is never just literary housekeeping; its a quiet manifesto about what kind of seriousness she trusts. Anne Stevenson starts with Blake, but trims him down to the part that travels well: "the lyrics". That small swerve away from the "prophetic books" is doing a lot of work. She is signaling allegiance to intensity without surrendering to grand systems, mythic sprawl, or the performative thunder of vision. She wants Blake's voltage, not his cosmology.

Then comes the real self-portrait: Yeats as the formative influence. Yeats offers a model of how to grow up in public as a poet - how to make lyric craft carry history, desire, politics, and occult yearning without collapsing into mere confession. For a young poet, especially one navigating the 20th century's suspicion of romantic grandiosity, Yeats is permission to be ambitious while staying formally sharp. The phrasing "I suppose" is telling: modesty, yes, but also a reluctance to overclaim lineage, as if influence is something you admit rather than declare.

Ending on "the American, Robert Frost" is a final calibration. Frost represents plain speech with traps inside it: conversational surfaces, moral pressure underneath. Calling him "the American" has a faintly anthropological distance, a British poets way of acknowledging a different music and a different national temperament. Together, these choices map a poetics of restraint-with-fire: lyric over prophecy, craft over spectacle, depth that keeps its composure.