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Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

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
Flowers
Flower
Beauty
Death
Mother
Beautiful
Unmoved
Perishable
Artificial

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If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
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Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
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Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.
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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.
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The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
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I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
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Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.
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Tinsel in February, tinsel in August. There are things in a man besides his reason.
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In a world of universal poverty The philosophers alone will be fat Against the autumn winds In an autumn that will be perpetual.
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Poetry increases the feeling for reality.
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The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.
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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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My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called standing people. . . .
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Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.
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Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.
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Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
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At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
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I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
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I have said no To everything, in order to get at myself. I have wiped away moonlight like mud.
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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.
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