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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
Defending
Represents
Poet
Mind

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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True villains are extremely photogenic.
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We live in an old chaos of the sun.
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God is gracious to some very peculiar people.
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Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.
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They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'
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I am one of you and being one of you is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary Angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again.
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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
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I have said no To everything, in order to get at myself. I have wiped away moonlight like mud.
Wallace Stevens
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Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.
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It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.
Wallace Stevens
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A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
Wallace Stevens
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That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say. That savage of fire, That seed, Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad.
Wallace Stevens
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The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
Wallace Stevens
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I was the world in which I walked.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
Wallace Stevens
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The heavy trees, The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust, The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.
Wallace Stevens
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The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man's interior world?
Wallace Stevens
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The word is the making of the world
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
Wallace Stevens