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:
“What is there in life except one’s ideas,
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?”
—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)
“Freud’s eye was the microscope of potency.
By fortune, his gray ghost may meditate
The spirits of all the impotent dead, seen clear,
And quickly understand, without their flesh,
How truly they had not been what they were.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“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 (1879–1955)