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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
Complete
Poetry
Purpose
Make
Life

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It is never the thing but the version of the thing.
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The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world.
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The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
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My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called standing people. . . .
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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 wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha, It held the shivering, the shaken limbs, Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.
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The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.
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The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
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I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.
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On a few words of what is real in the world I nourish myself. I defend myself against Whatever remains.
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The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
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Next to love is the desire for love.
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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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It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
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It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.
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Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
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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 essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.
Wallace Stevens
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Anything is beautiful if you say it is.
Wallace Stevens
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Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Wallace Stevens