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.
dark light imagination
We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
beautiful mother flower
Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.
perception essentials conception
Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
dark sun brightness
The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.
nature spring silly
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
paradise imperfect
The imperfect is our paradise.
art real play
The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
god fashion men
Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
writing men poetry
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
imagination consciousness actuality
in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
summer book night
The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.
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.
needs bliss feels
I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.