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:
“She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, ‘The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.’”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“He held the world upon his nose
And this-a-way he gave a fling.
His robes and symbols, ai-hi-hi
And that-a-way he twirled the thing.
Sombre as fir-trees, liquid cats
Moved in the grass without a sound.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end. We move between these points:
From that ever-early candor to its late plural....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“If it were lost in Übermenschlichkeit,
Perhaps our wretched state would soon come right.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The light is like a spider.
It crawls over the water.
It crawls over the edges of the snow.
It crawls under your eyelids
And spreads its webs there
Its two webs.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)