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The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
Wallace Stevens
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Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
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Playwright
Poet
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More quotes by Wallace Stevens
Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
Wallace Stevens
The subject matter... is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes.
Wallace Stevens
Life is the elimination of what is dead.
Wallace Stevens
Thought tends to collect in pools.
Wallace Stevens
Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.
Wallace Stevens
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
The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
Wallace Stevens
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.
Wallace Stevens
The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.
Wallace Stevens
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Wallace Stevens
After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
Wallace Stevens
Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
Wallace Stevens
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
Wallace Stevens
The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
Wallace Stevens
Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.
Wallace Stevens
We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Wallace Stevens
The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Wallace Stevens
It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.
Wallace Stevens
I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.
Wallace Stevens
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.
Wallace Stevens
