Author

Wallace Stevens

24 quotations

About Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was 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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Topics: Poetry Imagination Nature Alone Beauty Religion
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
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.
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
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 …
Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

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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.
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.
Death is the mother of Beauty hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
Death is the mother of Beauty hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
Death is the mother of Beauty hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
Death is the mother of Beauty hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.