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
furniture rooms trifles
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
writing needs doe
A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
thinking epidemics cases
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
art people religion
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
jobs character men
It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.
villain photogenic
True villains are extremely photogenic.
literature inappropriate source
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
needs rivals addresses
If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
gone fruit
Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
fire taught novel
The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
eye reality meditation
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
new-york stupid mirrors
New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
philosophy philosopher poet
The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
fall rain winter
It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow.