Wallace Stevens

Author profile

born

October 02, 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania, The United States

died

August 02, 1955

gender

male

website

http://www.wallacestevens.com/

genre

Poetry, Literature & Fiction

About this author

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Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence entitled "Phases" in the November 1914 edition of Poetry Magazine) was written at the age of thirty-five, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana, with whom he was close through much of his life. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned fifty. According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, who called Stevens the "best and most representative" American poet of the time, no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius.

Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree special student, aft...more

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Books by Wallace Stevens

Average rating: 4.36 · 5,404 ratings · 216 reviews · 41 distinct works

	The Collected Poems 4.34 avg rating — 3,302 ratings — published 1954 — 7 editions	My rating:
	The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play by Wallace Stevens, Holly Stevens 4.39 avg rating — 698 ratings — published 1971 — 6 editions	My rating:
	Collected Poetry & Prose by Wallace Stevens, Frank Kermode, Joan Richardson (Editor) 4.50 avg rating — 523 ratings — published 1997	My rating:
	The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination 4.26 avg rating — 300 ratings — published 1951 — 4 editions	My rating:
	Harmonium 4.55 avg rating — 153 ratings — published 1975 — 4 editions	My rating:
	Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose 4.28 avg rating — 89 ratings — published 1957 — 6 editions	My rating:
	The Emperor of Ice-Cream and Other Poems by Wallace Stevens, Bob Blaisdell (Editor) 4.18 avg rating — 67 ratings — published 1999 — 2 editions	My rating:
	The Letters of Wallace Stevens 4.29 avg rating — 48 ratings — published 1996	My rating:
	Stevens: Poems by Wallace Stevens, Helen Hennessy Vendler (Editor) 4.23 avg rating — 86 ratings — published 1947 — 6 editions	My rating:
	Man with the Blue Guitar 4.45 avg rating — 33 ratings — published 1998	My rating:

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Quotes by Wallace Stevens

“I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.”
― Wallace Stevens

tags: poetry

80 people liked it

“The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems

tags: poetry

55 people liked it

“Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.”
― Wallace Stevens

tags: beauty

53 people liked it

See all Wallace Stevens's quotes »

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Wallace Stevens

19 votes, 44.2%

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¡ POETRY !: Evaluating Poems: a Discursive Essay in Criticism	166	96	Dec 20, 2011 07:35pm
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Wallace Stevens

Author profile

combine editionsBooks by Wallace Stevens

Quotes by Wallace Stevens

Polls

Topics Mentioning This Author

combine editions
Books by Wallace Stevens