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
versions
It is never the thing but the version of the thing.
art scholar poetry-is
Poetry is the scholar's art.
dwelling light air
Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.
real imagination vitality
The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.
imagination candle-lights candle
God and the imagination are one.
children foxes hills
Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill;
mind satisfied
The mind can never be satisfied.
I am what is around me.
believe finals fiction
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
success poetry intelligence
The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
nerves
One must read poetry with one's nerves.
dark light definitions
Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.
summer pain loneliness
Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.
reality metaphor
Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.