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
play imagination essentials
The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.
world
The word is the making of the world
mind poet
The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.
imagination irrepressible
Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.
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.
men sophomore eternal
Man is an eternal sophomore.
light imagination people
The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.
imagination mind possibility
Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.
peasants results industry
Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.
philosophy sight medicine
To lose sensibility, to see what one sees, As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift, To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone, As if the paradise of meaning ceased To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.
cities want letting-you-go
The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.
reality self expression
It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.
writing fate race
The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
passion acceptance broken
Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.