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:
“Let us erect in the Basin a lofty fountain.
Suckled on ponds, the spirit craves a watery mountain.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon a blue guitar.’”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Of what is real I say,
Is it the old, the roseate parent or
The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else
The spirit and all ensigns of the self?”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“There comes a time when the waltz
Is no longer a mode of desire, a mode
Of revealing desire and is empty of shadows.
Too many waltzes have ended.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Angry men and furious machines
Swarm from the little blue of the horizon
To the great blue of the middle height.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)