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:
“An uncertain green,
Piano-polished, held the tranced machine
Of ocean, as a prelude holds and holds.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“So summer comes in the end to these few stains
And the rust and rot of the door through which she went.
The house is empty. But here is where she sat
To comb her dewy hair, a touchless light,
Perplexed by its darker iridescences.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Everything comes to him
From the middle of his field. The odor
Of earth penetrates more deeply than any word.
There he touches his being. There as he is
He is.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Freud’s eye was the microscope of potency.
By fortune, his gray ghost may meditate
The spirits of all the impotent dead, seen clear,
And quickly understand, without their flesh,
How truly they had not been what they were.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)