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The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.

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
Purpose
Make
Life
Complete
Poetry

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.
Wallace Stevens
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The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
Wallace Stevens
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Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.
Wallace Stevens
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God is in me or else is not at all.
Wallace Stevens
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I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.
Wallace Stevens
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The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.
Wallace Stevens
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On a few words of what is real in the world I nourish myself. I defend myself against Whatever remains.
Wallace Stevens
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To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game the ideal is to suggest.
Wallace Stevens
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To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.
Wallace Stevens
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We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy.
Wallace Stevens
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The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace Stevens
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The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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The muddy rivers of spring Are snarling Under the muddy skies. The mind is muddy.
Wallace Stevens
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Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.
Wallace Stevens
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The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man's interior world?
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens