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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

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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
Words
Helps
Lives
Pressure
Helping
Expression
Reality
Doubt
Seems
Imagination
Back
Lasts
Pressing
Live
Last
Preservation
Self
Sound
Analysis

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How red the rose that is the soldier
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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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It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.
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Frogs eat Butterflies, Snakes eat Frogs, Hogs eat Snakes, Men eat Hogs.
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The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
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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.
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The word is the making of the world
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Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
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Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
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Poetry increases the feeling for reality.
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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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Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill.
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Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.
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Words of the world are the life of the world.
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Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
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The imperfect is our paradise.
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It is time that beats in the breast and it is time That batters against the mind, silent and proud, The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.
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I have said no To everything, in order to get at myself. I have wiped away moonlight like mud.
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Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.
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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