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
death night dying
We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.
death mother dream
She says, "But in contentment I still feel The need for imperishable bliss." Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires. Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang?
old-things life-and-death people
The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.
candle god high highest imagination lights
We say God and the imagination are one . . . How high that highest candle lights the dark.
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.
moving rivers flying
The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
beauty art would-be
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
american-poet future
After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
american-poet beauty
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
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.
blue changed man music
They said, ''You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, ''Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.''
blue changed man
They said, "You have a blue guitar,/ You do not play things as they are."/ The man replied, "Things as they are/ Are changed upon a blue guitar.
looks man poet woman
A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman