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A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.

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
Exist
Poet
Words
Without
Things

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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How red the rose that is the soldier
Wallace Stevens
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You know that the nucleus of a time is not The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins Nor stand there making orotund consolations. He shares the confusions of intelligence.
Wallace Stevens
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behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.
Wallace Stevens
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Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
Wallace Stevens
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God is gracious to some very peculiar people.
Wallace Stevens
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All poetry is experimental poetry.
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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Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
Wallace Stevens
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An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.
Wallace Stevens
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Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
Wallace Stevens
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Life is the elimination of what is dead.
Wallace Stevens
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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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Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.
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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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.
Wallace Stevens
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The sea Severs not only lands but also selves.
Wallace Stevens
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Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill.
Wallace Stevens
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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
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Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.
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