Literary Birthday – 2 October – Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was born on 2 October 1879 and died on 2 August 1955.

Wallace Stevens Quotes

1. Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.
2. Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words.
3. A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
4. In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
5. Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
6. Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
7. In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
8. What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one’s meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
9. Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
10. Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
11. Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
12. I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite.

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet known for his philosophical and imaginative poetry. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, he studied at Harvard before earning his law degree from New York Law School. Stevens’s poetry often explores the relationship between reality and the human imagination, examining how people perceive the world and transform it through thought and language. His work considers the tension between what exists and what the mind creates from experience. During his lifetime, Stevens received numerous awards for his poetry, including the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949, the National Book Award for Poetry in 1951 and 1955, and the Frost Medal in 1951. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955 for The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Stevens was also honoured with a US postage stamp in 2012.

Source for Image: Photograph by Sylvia Salmi, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wallace_Stevens,_1948.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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