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
coffee cognac
Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.
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.
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.
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.
philosophy science philosopher
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
mirrors crowds foolish
Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
imagination mind possibility
Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.
reading writing should
The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
philosophy sight medicine
To lose sensibility, to see what one sees, As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift, To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone, As if the paradise of meaning ceased To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.
style
A change of style is a change of meaning.
passion acceptance broken
Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.
sex hands dolls
If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
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...
ethics painting
Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.