About Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevenswas an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.

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More quotes from Wallace Stevens

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

One cannot spend one’s time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

Intolerance respecting other people’s religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people’s art.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

The imagination is man’s power over nature.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

We say God and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one’s meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

The point of vision and desire are the same.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!

Wallace Stevens

American poet

The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

The genuine artist is never “true to life.” He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

Money is a kind of poetry.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

Wallace Stevens

American poet

One’s ignorance is one’s chief asset.

Wallace Stevens

American poet