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 was soldiers went marching over the rocks
And still the birds came, came in watery flocks,
Because it was spring and the birds had to come.
No doubt that soldiers had to be marching
And that drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“You know how Utamaro’s beauties sought
The end of love in their all-speaking braids.
Alas! Have all the barbers lived in vain
That not one curl in nature has survived?”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Only the rich remember the past,
The strawberries once in the Apennines,
Philadelphia that the spiders ate.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)