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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
Greatest
Desire
Difficult
Tell
Live
Feel
Despair
Feels
Physical
World
Poverty
More quotes by Wallace Stevens
Make the visible a little hard to see.
Wallace Stevens
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
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
It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.
Wallace Stevens
The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.
Wallace Stevens
The physical world is meaningless tonight And there is no other.
Wallace Stevens
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
Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.
Wallace Stevens
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
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
Wallace Stevens
Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.
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
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Wallace Stevens
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
Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
Wallace Stevens
We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.
Wallace Stevens
Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.
Wallace Stevens
A violent order is disorder and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.
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
Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.
Wallace Stevens
