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
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Thought, Thoughts
It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
—Wallace Stevens
Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Death
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Mystery
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
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Photography
The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Philosophy
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
Topics: Poetry
Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Poetry
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
Topics: Imagination
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Poetry
How red the rose that is the soldier
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: The Military
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Snow
Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Civilization
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Seasons, Spring
Intolerance respecting other people’s religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people’s art.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Tolerance
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
The imagination is man’s power over nature.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Imagination
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
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
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
Topics: Style
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
—Wallace Stevens
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Literature, Books
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
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
—Wallace Stevens
The bread of life is better than any souffle.
—Wallace Stevens
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
The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Authors & Writing
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
Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol? It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
—Wallace Stevens
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