Life & Wisdom Quote by Anne Stevenson

The line walks a tightrope between rebellion and belated accommodation, and that tension is the point. Stevenson opens with a claim poets love to make about themselves: self-legislation. "I have always made my own rules" frames her craft and her character as one continuous act of autonomy, the kind that’s earned rather than performed. Then comes the small, almost domestic pivot: "though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family". The phrasing is wryly telling. "Cooperate" sounds like a truce negotiated between sovereign states, not a warm confession of togetherness. The subtext: independence has costs, and aging (or simply time) has made those costs harder to ignore.

What makes the quote work is the reversal that follows. After asserting rule-breaking as an identity, she insists that poetry without "order or pattern" is "useless". Not less good, not unfashionable: useless. That’s a hard-edged, almost moral claim, and it quietly rebukes a strain of modern mythmaking where authenticity equals formlessness. Stevenson’s autonomy isn’t chaos; it’s craft. The poet makes her own rules, but rules still exist. Freedom, in her view, is the right to choose constraint.

Contextually, this lands as an argument for formal intelligence in an era that often prizes rawness and rupture. Stevenson suggests that even the most self-directed life needs structure to communicate, to be legible to others - family included. The poem, like the person, can’t live on attitude alone.