“Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.”
Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Wallace Stevens 278
American poet 1879–1955Related quotes
“The evils of poverty are not barren, but procreative”
Source: Poverty (1912), p. v
Context: The evils of poverty are not barren, but procreative, and... the workers in poverty, are in spite of themselves, giving to the world a litter of miserables, whose degeneracy is so stubborn and fixed that reclamation is almost impossible, especially when the only process of reclamation must consist in trying to force the pauper, vagrant, and weakling back into that struggle with poverty which is all of the time defeating stronger and better natures than theirs.
“The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.”
Preface
1900s, Major Barbara (1905)
“All this [wealth] excludes but one evil,—poverty.”
1777
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Life of Johnson (Boswell)
Source: All Men are Mortal (1946), p. 81
Stobaeus, iv. 29a. 19
Quoted by Stobaeus
“Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.”
“…in order to change poverty into wealth, one must start by displaying it.”
(420).
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)