Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Wallace Stevens (American Poet)

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) was an American Modernist poet whose work was dominated by the theme of how the mind conceives its world. Considered one of the 20th century’s greatest poetic masters, he won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize Collected Poems (1954.)

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and educated at Harvard and New York Law School, Stevens spent most of his life working as a lawyer at an insurance firm. He wrote poetry in private and in isolation from the literary community, developing a unique and colorful style. His ground-breaking poetry is rich in metaphors and original vocabulary as he reflects upon the nature of reality and imagination—how things indeed are and what we perceive them to be.

Some of Stevens’s best-known poems include “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Snow Man,” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”

Stevens’s notable works include Harmonium (1923,) Ideas of Order (1935,) Notes towards a Supreme Fiction (1942,) and a volume of essays The Necessary Angel (1951.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Wallace Stevens

Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Poetry

Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Civilization

Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol? It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
Wallace Stevens

Opusculum paedagogicum
The pears are not viols,
Nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.

They are yellow forms
Composed of curves
Bulging toward the base.
They are touched red.

They are not flat surfaces
Having curved outlines.
They are round
Tapering toward the top.

In the way they are modelled
There are bits of blue.
A hard dry leaf hangs
From the stem.

The yellow glistens.
It glistens with various yellows,
Citrons, oranges and greens
Flowering over the skin.

The shadows of the pears
Are blobs on the green cloth.
The pears are not seen
As the observer wills.
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Art

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.
Wallace Stevens

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Truth, Walking, Self-Discovery

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Philosophy

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Thoughts, Thought

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Music

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Snow

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
Topics: Imagination

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

How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Books, Literature

The bread of life is better than any souffle.
Wallace Stevens

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Seasons, Spring

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
Topics: Reality

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Perception

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
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
Topics: Reality

The imagination is man’s power over nature.
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Imagination

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Death

One cannot spend one’s time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
Wallace Stevens

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream
Wallace Stevens

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Photography

Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Perception

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.
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Proverbs, Mankind, Man

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world.
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Poetry

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Philosophy, Philosophers

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Poetry

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
Wallace Stevens
Topics: Books, Literature

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