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.
Stevens’s first period of writing begins with his 1923 publication of the Harmonium collection, followed by a slightly revised and amended second edition in 1930. His second period occurred in the eleven years immediately preceding the publication of his Transport to Summer, when Stevens had written three volumes of poems including Ideas of Order, The Man with the Blue Guitar, Parts of a World, along with Transport to Summer. His third and final period of writing poems occurred with the publication of The Auroras of Autumn in the early 1950s followed by the release of his Collected Poems in 1954 a year before his death. (via Wikipedia)
The following are a few great quotes by Wallace Stevens:
On Love:
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.
On Life:
To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.
Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.
The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
We live in an old chaos of the sun.
On Death:
Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.
On Learning:
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.
For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
The reader became the book; and summer night was like the conscious being of the book.
On Religion:
Intolerance respecting other people’s religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people’s art.