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
funny-basketball originality
It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.
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.
beauty body flesh mind momentary
Beauty is momentary in the mind / The fitful tracing of a portal; / But in the flesh it is immortal. / The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
candle god high highest imagination lights
We say God and the imagination are one . . . How high that highest candle lights the dark.
imagination force forces-of-nature
The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
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.
food ice cooking
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
everyday world
It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
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.
spirituality
God is in me or else is not at all.
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.