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
eye men hands
A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.
world conception
To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.
hands giving gold
In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American -- on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.
poetry achieve music-is
Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.
coffee cognac
Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.
people peculiar gracious
God is gracious to some very peculiar people.
beautiful ifs
Anything is beautiful if you say it is.
art poetry style
Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.
art poetry desire
Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.
air long poetry
Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
confusion effort poetry
You know that the nucleus of a time is not The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins Nor stand there making orotund consolations. He shares the confusions of intelligence.
time block self
It is never the thing but the version of the thing: The fragrance of the woman not her self, Her self in her manner not the solid block, The day in its color not perpending time, Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord, The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.
war moon night
Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.
morning kings sitting
The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.