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
style
A change of style is a change of meaning.
heaven earth hell
The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.
dirty silence speech
Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
change girl violet
We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy.
men play blue
They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'
spirituality
God is in me or else is not at all.
love writing ideas
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
real poetry perception
Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
order two violent
A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.
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.
boredom scholar known
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
science thinking observation
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
men imagination creative
The imagination is man's power over nature.
poetry invisible priests
The poet is the priest of the invisible.