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The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one's desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.
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
Desire
Difficult
Tell
Live
Feel
Despair
Feels
Physical
World
Poverty
Greatest
More quotes by Wallace Stevens
The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.
Wallace Stevens
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
The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Wallace Stevens
Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
Wallace Stevens
The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.
Wallace Stevens
I have said no To everything, in order to get at myself. I have wiped away moonlight like mud.
Wallace Stevens
Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.
Wallace Stevens
The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.
Wallace Stevens
Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
Wallace Stevens
We live in an old chaos of the sun.
Wallace Stevens
Thought tends to collect in pools.
Wallace Stevens
Imagination is the will of things. . . .
Wallace Stevens
The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.
Wallace Stevens
I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
Wallace Stevens
In a world of universal poverty The philosophers alone will be fat Against the autumn winds In an autumn that will be perpetual.
Wallace Stevens
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
Wallace Stevens
Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.
Wallace Stevens
The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.
Wallace Stevens
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.
Wallace Stevens
I was the world in which I walked.
Wallace Stevens
