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
stars moon light
Trees Trees, proud standing people stretching fingertips to the sky, reaching, praying glorious attention, breathing light. strength shelter timeless confidence bending and firm comforting rooted chorus line dancing with the moon, the wind, the clouds framing bursts of stars tender rugged celebration absorbing and releasing life each holy branch holding the power of the Universe. There.
spring moon color
In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be ...
moon world dirt
This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out Of dirt . . . It is not possible for the moon To blot this with its dove-winged blendings.
moon hymns paradise
After a lustre of the moon, we say We have not the need of any paradise, We have not the need of any seducing hymn.
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.
moon sea sun
It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
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.