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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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Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Seeks
Rome
Tragic
Older
Speech
Scene
Oldest
Poverty
Accent
Accents

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The subject matter... is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes.
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The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind.
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Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
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The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
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One must read poetry with one's nerves.
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Realism is a corruption of reality.
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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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As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
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Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass.
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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.
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Life is the elimination of what is dead.
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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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If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.
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If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
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The physical world is meaningless tonight And there is no other.
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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.
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