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
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.
book house world
The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book.
real imagination may
The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.
thinking differences window
It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.
truth hiking lakes
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
sun chaos
We live in an old chaos of the sun.
food ice cooking
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
lasts illusion disillusion
Disillusion is the last illusion.
everyday world
It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
water people shapes
Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
suicide freedom night
Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.
would-be world desolate
The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.