Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Wallace Stevens Poet

  • Gender: Male
  • Citizenship: United States
  • Born: Oct 2, 1879
  • Died: Aug 2, 1955

Wallace Stevens 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 "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."

The imagination is man's power over nature.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.

We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.

The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.

Money is a kind of poetry.

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

Death is the mother of Beauty hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.