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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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How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
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It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.
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It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
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The imperfect is our paradise.
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I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.
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The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
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The mind is smaller than the eye.
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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.
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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.
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One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow
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The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
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It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.
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Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.
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This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out Of dirt . . . It is not possible for the moon To blot this with its dove-winged blendings.
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Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.
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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.
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Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
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It is never the thing but the version of the thing.
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Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
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The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father, Because, in chief, it, only, can defend Against itself. At its mercy, we depend Upon it.
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