Wallace Stevens

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:

    “In the land of turkeys in turkey weather
    At the base of the statue, we go round and round.
    What a beautiful history, beautiful surprise!
    Monsieur is on horseback. The horse is covered with mice.”
    —Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    “He is what he hears and sees and if,
    Without pathos, he feels what he hears
    And sees, being nothing otherwise, he has not
    To go to the Louvre to behold himself.”
    —Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    “From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
    That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
    And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.”
    —Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    “Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints
    Of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.”
    —Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    “Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.”
    —Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)