Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.
Some of his best-known poems include "Valley Candle", "Anecdote of the Jar", "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock", "The Emperor of Ice-Cream", "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Sunday Morning", "The Snow Man", and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."
Read more about Wallace Stevens: Poetry
Famous quotes by wallace stevens:
“The sense of the serpent in younanke,
And your averted stride
Add nothing to the horror the frost
That glistens on your face and hair.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“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.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The starting point of the human and the end,
That in which space itself is contained, the gate
To the enclosure, day, the things illumined
By day, night and that which night illumines,
Night and its midnight-minting fragrances,
Night’s hymn of the rock, as in a vivid sleep.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“In his time, this one had little to speak of,
The softest word went gurrituck in his skull.
For him the moon was always in Scandinavia
And his daughter was a foreign thing.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The A B C of being,
The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound
Steel against intimation the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)