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Wallace Stevens Biography

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.

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Wallace Stevens Quotes

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.

Art, Love, Measure, Thinking, Today

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

Artificial, Essential, Essentials, Perception, Perceptions

It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.

Difference, Differences, Entrepreneur, Looking, Thinking, Window

The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one's desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.

Desire, Despair, Difficult, Live, World

The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.

Blackbird, Flying, Moving, River, Rivers

The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

Firmly, Hollow, Ice, Sky, Winter

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

Equivalent, Observation, Science, Thinking

All poetry is experimental poetry.

Experimental, Poetry, Poetry Is

It is the belief and not the god that counts.

Belief, Counts, God

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.

Experience, Poem, Reading, Should, Writing

I am what is around me.

God is in me or else is not at all.

God, Spiritual, Spirituality

The mind is smaller than the eye.

Eye, Mind, Smaller

The subject matter. . . is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes.

Composes, Matter, Scene, Space

Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.

Passion, Acceptance, Broken, Beneath, Yes

The poet's function is to make his imagination. . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.

Function, Help, Imagination, Light, Mind, People

Next to love is the desire for love.

Desire, Love, Love Is, Next

Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.

Ends, Moon, Night, Room, Sky, War

God is gracious to some very peculiar people.

God, Gracious, Peculiar, People

Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

Dark, Definitions, Light, Throw

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