Art & Creativity Quote by Anne Stevenson

Loyalty is a loaded word to attach to taste, and Anne Stevenson knows it. She isn’t merely listing favorites; she’s staking out a moral posture in the middle of a culture that treats preference as mood, playlist, or brand. To “remain loyal” implies pressure to defect - from the canon, from difficulty, from the slow apprenticeship required to love work that doesn’t flatter you on first contact. In one crisp sentence, she turns aesthetic commitment into a kind of character test.

The roll call is conspicuously conservative, but not casual: Bach through Schubert maps a lineage of formal rigor and emotional architecture, music built to reward re-listening. Shakespeare and Austen form a literary pairing that looks, at first, like breadth - the maximalist and the miniaturist - yet both are anatomists of human motive, masters of structure, and merciless about self-deception. Stevenson, a poet, is quietly aligning herself with craft over confession, shaped intelligence over spectacle.

There’s subtext, too, about cultural authority. This is the old European canon invoked not as museum-piece prestige but as a living standard - a way to resist the churn of novelty and the social expectation to update your enthusiasms. The phrasing carries a faint, bracing defiance: she’s not asking permission to keep reading and hearing what formed her; she’s insisting that inheritance can be chosen, not merely received.

Context matters: Stevenson came of age in a 20th-century literary world increasingly suspicious of “greatness” talk. Her loyalty is a rebuttal - not to new art, but to the idea that reverence is naive.