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
ethics painting
Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.
feelings emotion sentimentality
Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
world
Words of the world are the life of the world.
dream writing fate
Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.
mind poet
The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.
rose soldier red
How red the rose that is the soldier
opposites imagination normal
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
political poetic economic
All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.
writing fate race
The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
keys self sound
Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.
eye animal fire
That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say. That savage of fire, That seed, Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad.
literature painting problem
To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.
belief fury poetry-is
The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.
whales imagination brain
So, too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folklore of the world of the radio--remarks made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales--we should recognize him as below the level of nature but not as below the level of the imagination.