1879-1955, American Poet
All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.
Wallace Stevens – [Myth]
As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
Wallace Stevens – [Literature]
Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
Wallace Stevens – [Civilization]
Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.
Wallace Stevens – [Fiction]
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens – [Complexity]
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
Wallace Stevens – [Pettiness]
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
Wallace Stevens – [Literature]
I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.
Wallace Stevens – [Proverbs]
If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.
Wallace Stevens – [Egotism]
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
Wallace Stevens – [Intolerance]
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
Wallace Stevens – [Unknown]
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
Wallace Stevens – [Photography]
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace Stevens – [Literature]
One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
Wallace Stevens – [Modern and Modernism]
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
Wallace Stevens – [Philosophers and Philosophy]
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
Wallace Stevens – [Truth]
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
Wallace Stevens – [Spring]
Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
Wallace Stevens – [Style]
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.
Wallace Stevens – [Sun]
The genuine artist is never ''true to life.'' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
Wallace Stevens – [Reality]