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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.

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
Something
Artificial
Conception
Essential
Essentials
Perception
Conceptions
Poetry
Perceptions
Nature
Revelation
Mind
Revelations

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Disillusion is the last illusion.
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Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
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A violent order is disorder and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.
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...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.
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Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.
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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 live in an old chaos of the sun.
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A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
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Anything is beautiful if you say it is.
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Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
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Cold is our element and winter's air Brings voices as of lions coming down.
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Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
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The grackles sing avant the spring Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly. They sing right puissantly.
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Next to love is the desire for love.
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A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.
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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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A languid janitor bears His lantern through colonnades And the architecture swoons.
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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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Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.
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For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
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