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
writing needs doe
A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
writing night doors
...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.
reading writing should
The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
dream writing fate
Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.
writing fate race
The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
love writing ideas
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
writing men poetry
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
candle god high highest imagination lights
We say God and the imagination are one . . . How high that highest candle lights the dark.
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.
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.
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.
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.