Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevenswas an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth2 October 1879
CountryUnited States of America
suicide freedom night
Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.
would-be world desolate
The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
water people shapes
Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
lasts illusion disillusion
Disillusion is the last illusion.
food ice cooking
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
sun chaos
We live in an old chaos of the sun.
everyday world
It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
thinking differences window
It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.
needs bliss feels
I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.
summer book night
The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.
crush men garden
I thought how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes, barrens, wilds. It still dwarfs, terrifies, crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens, orchards and fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.
spirituality
God is in me or else is not at all.
poetry invisible priests
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
beauty art would-be
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.