A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
Wallace Stevens
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
Wallace Stevens
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
Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
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
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens
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
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
Wallace Stevens
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
Wallace Stevens
Money is a kind of poetry.
Wallace Stevens
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
Wallace Stevens
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
One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
Wallace Stevens
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
Wallace Stevens
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
Wallace Stevens
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
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
The imagination is man's power over nature.
Wallace Stevens
The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
Wallace Stevens
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
Wallace Stevens
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
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
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
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Type:
Poet
Date of Birth:
1879-10-02
Year of Death:
1955
Nationality:
American |
