Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) was an American Modernist poet whose work was dominated by the theme of how the mind conceives its world. Considered one of the 20th century’s greatest poetic masters, he won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize Collected Poems (1954.)
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and educated at Harvard and New York Law School, Stevens spent most of his life working as a lawyer at an insurance firm. He wrote poetry in private and in isolation from the literary community, developing a unique and colorful style. His ground-breaking poetry is rich in metaphors and original vocabulary as he reflects upon the nature of reality and imagination—how things indeed are and what we perceive them to be.
Some of Stevens’s best-known poems include “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Snow Man,” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
Stevens’s notable works include Harmonium (1923,) Ideas of Order (1935,) Notes towards a Supreme Fiction (1942,) and a volume of essays The Necessary Angel (1951.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Wallace Stevens
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.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction
Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Death
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
Topics: Reality
I can’t make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Man, Proverbs, Mankind
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Snow
One cannot spend one’s time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
—Wallace Stevens
How red the rose that is the soldier
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: The Military
I thought how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes, barrens, wilds. It still dwarfs, terrifies, crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens, orchards and fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Earth
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Literature, Books
All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.
—Wallace Stevens
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Seasons, Spring
Successful careers are those that realize in the man the dreams of the child.
—Wallace Stevens
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Perception
Intolerance respecting other people’s religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people’s art.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Tolerance
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
—Wallace Stevens
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
Topics: Aspirations
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Books, Literature
Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn?. But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Weakness
Opusculum paedagogicum
The pears are not viols,
Nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.
They are yellow forms
Composed of curves
Bulging toward the base.
They are touched red.
They are not flat surfaces
Having curved outlines.
They are round
Tapering toward the top.
In the way they are modelled
There are bits of blue.
A hard dry leaf hangs
From the stem.
The yellow glistens.
It glistens with various yellows,
Citrons, oranges and greens
Flowering over the skin.
The shadows of the pears
Are blobs on the green cloth.
The pears are not seen
As the observer wills.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Art
The bread of life is better than any souffle.
—Wallace Stevens
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Summer
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.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Youth
Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Civilization
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Self-Discovery, Truth, Walking
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
Topics: Reality
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream
—Wallace Stevens
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.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Music
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Photography
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Mystery
The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Philosophy
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Stanley Kunitz American Poet
Mark Van Doren American Poet, Critic
Howard Nemerov American Poet, Novelist
Conrad Aiken American Poet, Novelist
Archibald MacLeish American Poet, Dramatist
Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
Theodore Roethke American Poet
Robert Frost American Poet
Marianne Moore American Poet
Sylvia Plath American Poet, Novelist