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Wallace Stevens [1879-1955] American

Rank: 101
Poet (with poems)

Blank verse, Cubism, Formalism, Modernism

Wallace Stevens 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.

Poetry, Imagination, Nature, Art, Beauty, Communication, Dreams, Inspirational, Love, Morning, Religion, Truth

Quote	Tags	Rank
In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.	Communication, Imagination, Nature	101
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.	Truth	102
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.	Love, Poetry	103
The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.	Inspirational	104
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.		105
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.	Poetry	106
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.	Poetry	107
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.	Poetry	108
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.	Art, Religion	109
The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.		110
The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.		111
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.	Morning, Nature	112
Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.		113
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.	Imagination	114
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.		115
We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.	Imagination	116
Money is a kind of poetry.	Poetry	117
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.		118
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.	Beauty	119
One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.		120
The imagination is man's power over nature.	Imagination	121
Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.		122
The fire burns as the novel taught it how.		123
New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.		124
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!	Nature	125
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.		126
A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.		201
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.		202
The poet is the priest of the invisible.		203
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.		204
The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.		205
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.		206
The point of vision and desire are the same.		207
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.		208
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.		209
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.		210
Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.	Dreams	211
As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.		212
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.		213
After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.		214
One's ignorance is one's chief asset.		215
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.		216
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.		217

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