Wallace Stevens
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Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 - August 2, 1955) was an American Modernist poet.
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A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)
- Connoisseur of Chaos
Gubbinal
That strange flower, the sun,Is just what you say.
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.<p>That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.<p>That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.<p>The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
Poetry Is a Destructive Force
That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.<p>
It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.<p>
Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.<p>
He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own...<p>
The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.
Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit
If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,<p>Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost<p>Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.<p>He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;<p>As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.<p>It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.<p>It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.<p>If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness<p>A vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.
Attributed
Success as a result of industry is a peasant ideal.
- From Ten Jack-Offs by Charles Bukowski
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it:Wallace Stevens
"Death is the mother of beauty"
