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
fall rain winter
It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow.
fall autumn imagination
After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.
stars fall autumn
It was autumn and falling stars Covered the shrivelled forms Crouched in the moonlight.
fall passion silence
Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.
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.