Life & Wisdom Quote by Anne Stevenson

There is a clipped pragmatism in Stevenson’s line that doubles as a quiet rebuke: stop auditioning for permission. “Most criticism” is doing heavy lifting here, not as anti-intellectual swagger but as triage. She’s not declaring criticism worthless; she’s insisting the poet’s primary obligation is to the work, not to the running commentary around it. The verb choice matters: “ignore” is active, almost muscular. It implies that attention is a scarce resource and that poets, who already live in a state of heightened receptivity, must also cultivate a disciplined deafness.

The subtext is a warning about the way criticism can become a substitute for making. Reviews, workshop notes, cultural hot takes - they can feel like participation, even progress, while quietly displacing the harder, lonelier labor of drafting, failing, revising. Stevenson’s “get on with” carries a faint impatience with the literary ecosystem’s tendency to turn poetry into a sport of reception: who’s up, who’s dated, who’s problematic, who’s “important.” That ecosystem rarely rewards the slow accumulation of craft; it rewards legibility, positioning, narrative.

Contextually, Stevenson wrote across decades when poetry’s public footprint narrowed even as its gatekeeping infrastructure (journals, prizes, MFA culture) expanded. In that world, criticism can function less as illumination than as weather - omnipresent, mood-setting, impossible to control. Her advice isn’t to despise the reader; it’s to refuse the critic’s timetable. The poem, she implies, is made in a different clock.