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
beauty art would-be
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
old-things life-and-death people
The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.
lasts illusion disillusion
Disillusion is the last illusion.
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.
poetry invisible priests
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
moving rivers flying
The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
paradise imperfect
The imperfect is our paradise.
perception mind essentials
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
religion spirit spirituality
It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
good-friend ideas air
What is there in life except one's ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
poet
A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.
mirrors crowds foolish
Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
ethics painting
Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.
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.