Life & Wisdom Quote by Anne Stevenson

The hardest flex in poetry is making craft disappear, and Anne Stevenson names that vanishing act without romanticizing it. She admits to labor, then immediately reframes it: the real effort is resisting the audible evidence of effort. That’s a quietly polemical stance in a culture that loves either raw “authenticity” or showy virtuosity. Stevenson is after a third thing: the poem that feels inevitable, like speech that just happens to land perfectly.

Her subtext is about control disguised as ease. “Natural as possible” is not an invitation to loosen standards; it’s a high bar, because naturalness has to be engineered. The line also doubles as a rebuke to the confessional myth that sincerity alone makes art. You can be genuine and still be shapeless; you can be strict and still sound alive. Stevenson’s “quite strict form” isn’t a corset, it’s an instrument: pressure that forces meaning into music.

The context matters: Stevenson wrote in an era when free verse had become the default prestige option, and formalism could read as fussy, nostalgic, even politically suspect. She defends form not as a tradition to obey but as a physics of sound. By tying strictness to “musical rhythm and sound,” she locates discipline in the ear, not in rule-following. The point isn’t to impress the reader with complexity; it’s to make the poem feel like it’s breathing on its own, while every breath has been counted.