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:
“You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Professor Eucalyptus said, ‘The search
For reality is as momentous as
The search for god.’ It is the philosopher’s search
For an interior made exterior
And the poet’s search for the same exterior made
Interior: breathless things broodingly abreath....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“No self in the mass: the braver being,
The body that could never be wounded,
The life that never would end, no matter
Who died, the being that was an abstraction.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“‘I have said no
To everything, in order to get at myself.
I have wiped away moonlight like mud....’”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The night
Makes everything grotesque. Is it because
Night is the nature of man’s interior world?”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)