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

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
Cannot
Many
Important
Things
Time
Modernism
Spend
Modern

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And what's above is in the past As sure as all the angels are.
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The grackles sing avant the spring Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly. They sing right puissantly.
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The muddy rivers of spring Are snarling Under the muddy skies. The mind is muddy.
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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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Life is the elimination of what is dead.
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Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
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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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How cold the vacancy When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist First sees reality. The mortal no Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.
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The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.
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Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
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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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In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be.
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It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.
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The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.
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The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.
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Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.
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The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.
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It may be that the ignorant man, alone, Has any chance to mate his life with life That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.
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Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.
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Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
Wallace Stevens