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Wallace Stevens Quotes
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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".

✵ 2. October 1879 – 2. August 1955
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Wallace Stevens: 278   quotes 6   likes

Wallace Stevens Quotes

“She sang beyond the genius of the sea”

Wallace Stevens

"The Idea of Order at Key West"
Ideas of Order (1936)

Sea

“What the poet has in mind... is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination. The poet tries to exemplify it, in part as I have tried to exemplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives.”

Wallace Stevens

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

Knowledge , Faith , Imagination , Parting

“Is it he or is it I that experience this?”

Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure

For Men

“Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house...
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.”

Wallace Stevens

Source: Parts of a World (1942) "The Well Dressed Man With a Beard"

Sleep , Housing

“The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

Making love

“If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost

Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;

As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.

It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness

A vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.”

Wallace Stevens

"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"
Transport to Summer (1947)

Housing , Star , God , Light

“It must be visible or invisible,
Invisible or visible or both:
A seeing and unseeing in the eye.

The weather and the giant of the weather,
Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air:
An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought.”

Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract

Weather