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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

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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
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Role
Light
Poet
Become
Short
Live
Roles
Mind
Imagination
Make
Help
People
Lives
Helping
Function

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It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
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The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.
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Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
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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.
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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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New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
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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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Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
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The imagination is man's power over nature.
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It is the belief and not the god that counts.
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It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.
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Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
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Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
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Words of the world are the life of the world.
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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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Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.
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The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.
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Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.
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