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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

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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
Long
Blur
Air
Poet
Poetry
Beyond
Lives
Uncertainly
Thing
Radiantly
Much
Blurs

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow
Wallace Stevens
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The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
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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Death is the mother of Beauty hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
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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If the hero is not a person, the emblem Of him, even if Xenophon, seems To stand taller than a person stands, has A wider brow, large and less human Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body Of a primitive.
Wallace Stevens
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The mind is smaller than the eye.
Wallace Stevens
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We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy.
Wallace Stevens
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The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
Wallace Stevens
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Disillusion is the last illusion.
Wallace Stevens
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I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.
Wallace Stevens
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It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is a means of redemption.
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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Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.
Wallace Stevens
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It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most. It is older than the oldest speech of Rome. This is the tragic accent of the scene.
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.
Wallace Stevens
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The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
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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To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game the ideal is to suggest.
Wallace Stevens