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A change of style is a change of meaning.

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
Meaning
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More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.
Wallace Stevens
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Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.
Wallace Stevens
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After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.
Wallace Stevens
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We live in an old chaos of the sun.
Wallace Stevens
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The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.
Wallace Stevens
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Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
Wallace Stevens
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A violent order is disorder and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.
Wallace Stevens
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Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.
Wallace Stevens
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Life is the elimination of what is dead.
Wallace Stevens
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One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guinea, challenges The crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice
Wallace Stevens
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The figures of the past go cloaked. They walk in mist and rain and snow And go, go slowly, but they go.
Wallace Stevens
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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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How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
Wallace Stevens
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All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.
Wallace Stevens
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It was autumn and falling stars Covered the shrivelled forms Crouched in the moonlight.
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