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:
“It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.”
—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)
“Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“His firm stanzas hang like hives in hell
Or what hell was, since now both heaven and hell
Are one, and here, O terra infidel.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The muddy rivers of spring
Are snarling
Under the muddy skies.
The mind is muddy.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)