Wallace Stevens
80 quotes
Biography
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.
"Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake."
"The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself."
"I do not know which to prefer,The beauty of inflectionsOr the beauty of innuendosThe blackbird whistlingOr just after."
"The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream."
"We live in an old chaos of the sun."
"The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly."
"The mind can never be satisfied."
"One must read poetry with one's nerves."
"A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light."
"Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!"
"In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American — on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion."
"To be young is all there is in the world. The rest is nonsense — and cant. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. ... Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds."
"How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture."
"Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood."
"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."
"Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore."
"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."
"The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used. A free form does not assure freedom. As a form, it is just one more form. So that it comes to this, I suppose, that I believe in freedom regardless of form."
"Poetry is poetry, and one’s objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one’s objective in music is to achieve music."
"Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs."
"The book of moonlight is not written yet."
"The natives of the rain are rainy men."
"The plum survives its poems."
"Green crammers of the green fruits of the world."
"The essential gaudiness of poetry."