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
rain past snow
The figures of the past go cloaked. They walk in mist and rain and snow And go, go slowly, but they go.
past night lasts
What's down below is in the past Like last night's crickets, far below.
angel past heaven
And what's above is in the past As sure as all the angels are.
past might belief
If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, The future might stop emerging out of the past, Out of what is full of us; yet the search And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.
candle god high highest imagination lights
We say God and the imagination are one . . . How high that highest candle lights the dark.
looks man poet woman
A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman
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.
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.
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.
beauty body flesh mind momentary
Beauty is momentary in the mind / The fitful tracing of a portal; / But in the flesh it is immortal. / The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
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.