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The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

Wallace Stevens

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Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Resist
Poem
Intelligence
Poetry
Almost
Success
Must
Successfully

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
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I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.
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An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.
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A languid janitor bears His lantern through colonnades And the architecture swoons.
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I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.
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What is there in life except one's ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
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Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.
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If the hero is not a person, the emblem Of him, even if Xenophon, seems To stand taller than a person stands, has A wider brow, large and less human Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body Of a primitive.
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Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.
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If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, The future might stop emerging out of the past, Out of what is full of us yet the search And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.
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Poetry is a means of redemption.
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Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
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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.
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It is never the thing but the version of the thing.
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The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
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The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.
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After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.
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Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
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Unless we believe in the hero, what is there To believe? Incisive what, the fellow Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud.
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Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.
Wallace Stevens