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
past might belief
If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, The future might stop emerging out of the past, Out of what is full of us; yet the search And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.
moon hymns paradise
After a lustre of the moon, we say We have not the need of any paradise, We have not the need of any seducing hymn.
reading thoughtful thinking
The thinker as reader reads what has been written. He wears the words he reads to look upon Within his being....
beauty mother waiting
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
space matter scene
The subject matter... is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes...
opposites imagination normal
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
world
Words of the world are the life of the world.
ethics painting
Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.
mean culture benefits
One ought not to hoard culture . It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
eye men hands
A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.
world conception
To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.
hands giving gold
In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American -- on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.
poetry achieve music-is
Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.
coffee cognac
Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.