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
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.
funny-basketball originality
It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.
would-be world desolate
The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
water people shapes
Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
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.
beauty art would-be
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
moving rivers flying
The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
paradise imperfect
The imperfect is our paradise.
dirty silence speech
Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
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.
winter ice sky
The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
religion spirit spirituality
It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.