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:
“Panoramas are not what they used to be.
Claude has been dead a long time
And apostrophes are forbidden on the funicular.
Marx has ruined Nature,
For the moment.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“A scholar, in his Segmenta, left a note,
As follows, ‘The Ruler of Reality,
If more unreal than New Haven, is not
A real ruler, but rules what is unreal.’”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“He is what he hears and sees and if,
Without pathos, he feels what he hears
And sees, being nothing otherwise, he has not
To go to the Louvre to behold himself.”
—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 genuine artist is never ‘true to life.’ He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)