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
beauty art would-be
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
artist aware genuine life normally sees
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.
art people religion
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
love art thinking
I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.
art scholar poetry-is
Poetry is the scholar's art.
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.
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.
art nature tennessee
I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.
moving rivers flying
The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
fingers keys music sounds spirit
Just as my fingers on the keys / Make music, so the selfsame sounds / On my spirit make a music, too. / Music is feeling, then, not sound.
family forced home last nice people poverty talk telling thirty tremendous work worry youth
To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) --but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.
eye few fiction himself thinking torn woman
Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.
candle god high highest imagination lights
We say God and the imagination are one . . . How high that highest candle lights the dark.