Wallace Stevens
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"Wallace Stevens" was an American Modernism/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 (poem)/The Emperor of Ice-Cream," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "Sunday Morning (poem)/Sunday Morning," "The Snow Man," and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."

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In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Money is a kind of poetry.

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

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.

To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

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.

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.