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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.

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
World
Sea
Saws
Truly
Strange
Heard
Came
Felt
Compass
Found
Walked

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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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The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.
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I was the world in which I walked.
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The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world.
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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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What is there in life except one's ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
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Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
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Poetry increases the feeling for reality.
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God is gracious to some very peculiar people.
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Life is not free from its forms.
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A languid janitor bears His lantern through colonnades And the architecture swoons.
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True villains are extremely photogenic.
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To lose sensibility, to see what one sees, As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift, To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone, As if the paradise of meaning ceased To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.
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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.
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The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
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We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
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It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
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We live in an old chaos of the sun.
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I am one of you and being one of you is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary Angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again.
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Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
Wallace Stevens