Quote

Unless we believe in the hero, what is there To believe? Incisive what, the fellow Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud.

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
Unless
Belief
Incisive
Believe
Devise
Make
Heroines
Good
Mud
Fellow
Fellows
Hero

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Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
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I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.
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And what's above is in the past As sure as all the angels are.
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One must read poetry with one's nerves.
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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.
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Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.
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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.
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The physical world is meaningless tonight And there is no other.
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Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.
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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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It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.
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The sea Severs not only lands but also selves.
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In a world of universal poverty The philosophers alone will be fat Against the autumn winds In an autumn that will be perpetual.
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Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.
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...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.
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It is never the thing but the version of the thing.
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Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
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After a lustre of the moon, we say We have not the need of any paradise, We have not the need of any seducing hymn.
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A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.
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Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world
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