STEVENSON, Anne (Katharine) 1933-

PERSONAL: Born January 3, 1933, in Cambridge, England; U.S. citizen; daughter of Charles Leslie (a philosopher) and Louise (Destler) Stevenson; married Robin Hitchcock, June, 1954 (divorced, 1959); married Mark Elvin, September, 1962 (divorced, 1983); married Michael John Guy Farley, April 24, 1984 (divorced, 1986); married Peter Lucas, September 3, 1987; children: (first marriage) Caroline Margaret; (second marriage) John Gawain, Charles Lionel. Education: University of Michigan, B.A., 1954, M.A., 1962. Politics: Democrat. Hobbies and other interests: Music, traveling, reading.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Neil Astley, Bloodaxe Books, Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland NE48 1RRP, England.

CAREER: Poet and critic. Fellow in writing at University of Dundee, Scotland, 1973-75, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, 1975-77, and Bulmershe College, Reading, 1977-78; Poetry Bookshop, Hay-on-Wye, Wales, co-proprietor, 1978-81; Northern Arts Literary Fellow at University of Newcastle upon Tyne and University of Durham, 1981-82; writer-in-residence at University of Edinburgh, beginning mid-1980s. Member of advisory panel, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1983-85. Part-time teacher of cello in Cambridge, England; cellist in string orchestra connected with Cambridge University.

MEMBER: Royal Society of Literature (fellow), Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Avery and Jules Hopwood Award, University of Michigan, 1950, 1952, 1954; Scottish Arts Council Award, 1974; Welsh Arts Council Award, 1980; Northern Rock foundation Literary Award, 2002.

WRITINGS:

poetry

Living in America, Generation, 1965.

Reversals, Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1969.

Travelling behind Glass, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1974.

Correspondences: A Family History in Letters (also see below), Wesleyan University Press (Middletown, CT), 1974.

Enough of Green, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1977.

A Morden Tower Reading 3, Morden Tower (Newcastle upon Tyne, England), 1977.

Cliff Walk: A Poem, Keepsake Press (Richmond, England), 1977.

Sonnets for Five Seasons, Five Seasons Press (Hereford, England), 1979.

Green Mountain, Black Mountain, Rowan Tree Press (Boston, MA), 1982.

Minute by Glass Minute, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1982.

New Poems, Other Branch Readings (Leamington Spa, England), 1982.

Making Poetry, Pisces Press (Oxford, England), 1983.

A Legacy, Taxus Press (Durham, England), 1983.

Black Grate Poems, Inky Parrot Press (Oxford, England), 1984.

The Fiction-Makers, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1985.

Winter Time, Mid-Northumberland Arts Group (Ashington, England), 1986.

Selected Poems, 1956-1986, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1987.

The Other House, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1989.

Four and a Half Dancing Men, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1994.

The Collected Poems of Anne Stevenson, 1955-1995, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

Once upon a Time This Morning, Greenwillow Books (New York, NY), 1997.

Granny Scarecrow, Bloodaxe Books (Chester Springs, PA), 2000.

A Report from the Border: New and Rescued Poems, Bloodaxe Books (Tarset, Northumberland, England), 2003.

other

Elizabeth Bishop (criticism), Twayne (New York, NY), 1966.

Correspondences (radio play), British Broadcasting Corp., 1975.

Child of Adam (radio play), British Broadcasting Corp., 1976.

(Editor) Frances Bellerby, Selected Poems, Enitharmon (London, England), 1986.

(Editor, with Amy Clampitt and Craig Raine) 1985 Anthology: The Observer and Ronald Duncan Foundation International Poetry Competition on Behalf of the Arvon Foundation, Arvon Foundation (Beaworthy, England), 1987.

Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (biography), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1989.

(Coeditor with Dannie Abse) The Gregory Anthology, 1991-1993, Sinclair-Stevenson (London, England)), 1994.

Between the Iceberg and the Ship: Selected Essays, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1998.

Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop, Bellew (London, England), 1998.

Contributor to anthology Strong Words, Bloodaxe Books (Tarset, Northumberland, England), 2000. Contributor to periodicals, including Times Literary Supplement and other periodicals in Great Britain and the United States. Former poetry critic for Listener. Coeditor, Other Poetry Magazine.

SIDELIGHTS: Anne Stevenson "has what Henry James call[ed] 'sensibility to the scenery of life,'" commented Dorothy Donnelly in Michigan Quarterly Review, adding that "Her poems have added considerably to the scenery of our own landscapes." Stevenson's poetry, a Times Literary Supplement critic wrote, is "remarkable for a fresh, authentic brand of realist observation and an impressive capacity to reflect intelligently on what it sees."

The landscape Stevenson creates is a shifting one, built upon the ambiguous borders between England and America, family and self, dependence and independence, tradition and nonconformity. "The landscape created by Anne Stevenson's poems … shimmers with the tenuous colors and outlines of reflections in water," Donnelly noted of Reversals. "The poet hesitates, caught between reality and illusion, moving through a flickering, borderless region, a land behind the land…. Stevenson's poems evoke with delicacythe misty, the insubstantial, the indefinite, 'the line between land and water,' the view from which 'there is no end to illusion.'" Nicholas Brooke in New Review observed that the poems in Travelling behind Glass "characterize America and Europe from no fixed base."

Stevenson herself has commented upon the feeling of movement and duality her poetry elicits. "Although I am an American … I have lived almost constantly in Great Britain since 1962," she once noted. "This has meant a measure of flexibility and a constant sense of flux … [as well as] the sense I have constantly of a divided life between the Old World and the New."

The poet has developed this theme of "flux" in much of her work. In many of Stevenson's poems it takes the form of the narrator questioning her own actions or the direction her life has taken. Stevenson is "given to querying life," stated Donnelly, "and the frequent questions asked in these poems [in Reversals] indicate their prevailingly tentative tone. Answers are usually avoided, sometimes suggested, often simply not to be had." Kaye Boyd, a principal character in Correspondences: A Family History in Letters, questions her decision to become an author—a decision that also entails leaving her family home: "Dear Father, I love you but can't know you./I've given you all that I can./Can these pages make amends for what was not said?/Do justice to the living, to the dead?" In "Victory," included in Reversals, the narrator is compelled to ask her infant son, "Why do I have to love you?"

Although the "landscape" in which Stevenson moves is "tentative," "flickering," and "borderless," her responses to it are not. As Times Literary Supplement reviewer Andrew Motion observed, "The characteristic method of Enough of Green is to confront the harsh realities of life, acknowledge the temptation to evade them, and then discover rewards in them as well as disappointments."

Correspondences: A Family History in Letters is Stevenson's most ambitious accomplishment. The book traces the Chandler family from its pre-Revolution, New England roots to the present. "Correspondences … is an ambitious book," asserted Richard Caram in Open Places. "[It] just burns to be an American epic, to combine the insights of history with the characterizations of fiction and the fine aesthetic harmonies of poetry. And it works, in the end, far better than it has a right to—particularly as a very readable form of history, a mythopoetic look backward." Noted Stewart Conn in Listener: "With penetrating insight, Anne Stevenson depicts successive generations blighted by drink and estrangement, woe within marriage and a wonderment that man has deserved propagation at all in this wicked world."

Stevenson's characteristic sense of ambiguity is also present in Correspondences. Caram concluded that the final section of the book "does most deftly what poetry can do better than history: hold the ambiguities of the lives of the surviving members of the family in lifelike suspension, unwilling to resolve them into finalities, swirling them round and round in a mixture rhetorically rich enough to seem almost a resolution."

Other critics, however, felt that Correspondences tries to accomplish too great a task. Douglas Dunn in Encounter noted that the work "has been worked hard at, not only as a poem, but as something to hold the reader's attention; unfortunately, the impression is that the clever writer was conjuring with too many gimmicks, for all the weightiness of her critique of America." In New Review Brooke commented that since the poems in Correspondences "are not long, it follows they are overloaded, and the story is reduced to familiar types…. A novelist would do more thanthis; a poet should not do less." Concurred Robert Garfitt in London: "Moving as some of [Correspondences] is … one is left wondering what it has achieved that a novel couldn't have achieved, and, more important, whether a more intimate and telling exploration, accessible only to poetry, hasn't been missed."

Critical controversy surrounded the publication of Stevenson's biography of the late poet Sylvia Plath, titled Bitter Fame. In the biography Stevenson attempts to shed new light on many of the myths that surround the life and death of Plath, among them the idea that Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, drove her to suicide and that Plath was too sensitive and oppressed to survive the harsh realities of life. Stevenson argues that Plath actually suffered from an "ego weakness" that contributed to psychic pain, "manic violence," and ultimately to her suicide at age thirty. While reviewers universally praise Stevenson's close reading of Plath's poetry, some have found her assessment of Plath's life and mental condition reductive and limited. Robert Pinsky of the New York Times Book Review complained, for example, that Stevenson paints too idyllic and consistently forgiving a portrait of Hughes. David Roberts of Chicago's Tribune Books, on the other hand, praised Stevenson's "rehabilitation" of Hughes but faulted the biographer's reliance on Plath's private notebooks at the expense of commentary from diverse people who knew the poet personally. In a lengthy examination of the controversy surrounding Bitter Fame, Janet Malcolm in the New Yorker emphasized the extreme degree of control over the book exerted by Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes's older sister and the former literary agent to the Plath estate. Malcolm argued that "the misdeed for which Stevenson could not be forgiven" by critics of Bitter Fame was to acknowledge the vulnerability of relatives of the biographical subject as well as the limits of the biographical genre itself. Malcolm found Stevenson's book "by far the most intelligent and the only aesthetically satisfying of the five biographies of Plath written to date."

Published following her biography of Plath, Stevenson's poetry collection The Other House received temperate reviews. "Four years writing Sylvia Plath's biography," observed Adam Thorpe in a Listener review, "has given [Stevenson's] recent poems a somewhat bloodier edge, and the odd, somewhat disconcertingly Plathian image." Most reviewers, however, pointed to a tone of dispassionate moderation in the volume. Deeming the book an "intermediate" collection, Rodney Pybus argued in Stand that the "unifying theme" of The Other House is "one of indirection, of persisting with life, finding models of resilience in nature, relishing new birth, as solace for pain." Stevenson's poetry collection Four and a Half Dancing Men has been praised as a stylistic departure from her previous verse. "Four and a Half Dancing Men is altogether a leaner, tighter affair," commented Neil Powell in the Times Literary Supplement. "It is constructed as a triptych in which two sections of poems set mainly in county Durham and Wales frame a central sequence about old age."

Between the Iceberg and the Ship followed in 1999, after which came the publication of Granny Scarecrow. In this latter work Stevenson examines closely the small details of her world; the title poem chronicles the death of an old woman, describing her "old flowered print house-dress" which is put back to work, "crucified …/live, on a pole" as a scarecrow. In an image from the poem "An Angel," the angelic specter appears as a "bracelet of phosphorus/just outside the windscreen of a car." John Taylor in Poetry found that Stevenson "is at her most original when she explores states of consciousness like these, which involve the perplexing ways that mind and body interact." "Stevenson has always been a poet concerned with memory and with how lives are shaped through language," remarked Gerard Woodward in a Times Literary Supplement assessment of Granny Scarecrow. Woodward went on to describe the poetry as "always sharply accurate, perfectly balanced, musically assured."

While she has established herself as one of the important voices of twentieth-century Anglo-American poetry, Stevenson looks to the twenty-first in an essay published in the anthology Strong Words. "In my book, the ideal poem of the next century will not be a game of hunt the references," she wrote. "It will not be a furious tirade, or an in-depth self-interview, or a river of tears that floods its banks with self-pity. It will not mistake novelty for originality. It will not be afraid of learning from the poetry of the past, but it will not be imitative either…. Although many such influencesmay flow into the writing of it, in the end it will be written by a very rare person—a poet who is in thrall to nothing but poetry's weird tyranny and ungovernable need to exist."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 9, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 7, 1977, Volume 33, 1985.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 40. Poets of Great Britain and Ireland since 1960, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.

Strong Words, Bloodaxe Books (Tarset, Northumberland, England), 2000.

periodicals

Encounter, December, 1974, Douglas Dunn, review of Correspondences: A Family History in Letters; April, 1978.

Entertainment Weekly, August 7, 1998, review of Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, p. 68.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), October 28, 1989.

Hudson Review, spring, 1998, review of The Collected Poems of Anne Stevenson, 1955-1995, p. 274.

Lines Review, September, 1974.

Listener, November 28, 1974, Stewart Conn, review of Correspondences; July 5, 1990, Adam Thorpe, review of The Other House, p. 34.

London, November, 1974, Robert Garfitt, review of Correspondences.

London Review of Books, October 26, 1989, p. 28.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 20, 1989.

Michigan Quarterly Review, fall, 1966; spring, 1971.

New Review, October, 1974, Nicholas Brooke, review of Correspondences. New Statesman, November 28, 1974; February 10, 1978; June 22, 1990, p. 52.

New Yorker, August 23, 1993, Janet Malcolm, review of Bitter Fame, p. 83.

New York Times, August 9, 1989.

New York Times Book Review, November 15, 1987; August 27, 1989, Robert Pinsky, review of Bitter Fame, p. 11.

Observer (London, England), September 29, 1996, review of The Collected Poems of Anne Stevenson, 1955-1995, p. 18.

Open Places, spring/summer, 1976, Richard Caram, review of Correspondences.

Ploughshares, autumn, 1978.

Poetry, February, 1971; November, 1975; August, 1999, Christian Wiman, review of Between the Iceberg and the Ship: Selected Essays, p. 286; April, 2002, John Taylor, review of Granny Scarecrow, p. 40.

Quadrant, July, 1994, review of Four and a Half Dancing Men, p. 115.

Sewanee Review, winter, 2001, review of Between the Iceberg and the Ship, p. 147.

Stand, spring, 1992, Rodney Pybus, review of The Other House, p. 110.

Times Literary Supplement, July 19, 1974; November 25, 1977, Andrew Motion, review of Enough of Green; May 6, 1983; January 10, 1986; July 17, 1987; May 20, 1988; October 27, 1989; November 2, 1990, p. 1184; February 4, 1994, Neil Powell, review of Four and a Half Dancing Men, p. 22; July 25, 1997, review of Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop and Between the Iceberg and the Ship, p. 25.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), August 13, 1989, David Roberts, review of Bitter Fame, p. 3.

Washington Post Book World, August 20, 1989; December 7, 1997, review of The Collected Poems of Anne Stevenson, 1955-1995, p. 12.

World Literature Today, autumn, 1994, Susan Smith Nash, review of Four and a Half Dancing Men, p. 821.

Yale Review, spring, 1990, p. 446.

online

Anne Stevenson Web site,http://www.anne-stevenson.co.uk/ (September 9, 2003).*