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The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against 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
Mind
Defending
Represents
Poet

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
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Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
Wallace Stevens
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...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.
Wallace Stevens
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A pear should come to the table popped with juice, Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.
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Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
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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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The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die The broken cartwheel on the hill.
Wallace Stevens
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The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father, Because, in chief, it, only, can defend Against itself. At its mercy, we depend Upon it.
Wallace Stevens
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And what's above is in the past As sure as all the angels are.
Wallace Stevens
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Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
Wallace Stevens
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We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Wallace Stevens
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It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.
Wallace Stevens
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All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.
Wallace Stevens
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It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.
Wallace Stevens
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The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world.
Wallace Stevens
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Cold is our element and winter's air Brings voices as of lions coming down.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament.
Wallace Stevens
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It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow.
Wallace Stevens
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The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
Wallace Stevens