Science & Tech Quote by Anne Stevenson

A poet calling out “literary jargon” isn’t just taste-making; it’s a border dispute. Stevenson draws a hard line between criticism that serves literature and criticism that serves itself. The opening clause, blunt and personal, is a preemptive refusal of credentialed gatekeeping: she’s not auditioning for the seminar room, and she doesn’t want the reader to feel they need a passport stamped with theory to enter a poem.

The real pressure point is her demotion of criticism from “science” to “aid.” Science implies mastery, replicable methods, and the authority to declare what a text is. Stevenson rejects that posture as a category mistake. Literature isn’t a specimen; it’s an encounter. When criticism borrows the lab coat, it can start treating ambiguity as a problem to solve rather than an experience to sharpen. Her formulation restores humility: criticism should be a set of tools, not a tribunal.

There’s also a quiet defense of pleasure and clarity here, values that often get framed as naive in eras dominated by high theory. Stevenson came of age when academic criticism increasingly professionalized itself, generating specialized vocabularies that could illuminate texts but also exclude non-initiates. Her stance isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s pro-reader. The subtext is ethical: if criticism can’t help someone read more attentively and feel more deeply, it’s not “advanced,” it’s just insulated. By calling criticism an “aid to art,” she insists the artwork stays sovereign and the critic stays useful.