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:
“Clandestine steps upon imagined stairs
Climb through the night, because his cuckoos call.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Yet there was a man within me
Could have risen to the clouds,
Could have touched these winds,
Bent and broken them down,
Could have stood up sharply in the sky.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Tell X that speech is not dirty silence
Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The bud of the apple is desire, the down-falling gold,
The catbird’s gobble in the morning half-awake
These are real only if I make them so. Whistle
For me, grow green for me and, as you whistle and grow green,
Intangible arrows quiver and stick in the skin
And I taste at the root of the tongue the unreal of what is real.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)