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:
“The A B C of being,
The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound
Steel against intimation the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“A scholar, in his Segmenta, left a note,
As follows, ‘The Ruler of Reality,
If more unreal than New Haven, is not
A real ruler, but rules what is unreal.’”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Tonight there are only the winter stars.
The sky is no longer a junk-shop,
Full of javelins and old fire-balls,
Triangles and the names of girls.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)