Wallace Stevens Quotes
A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.
Stevens, Wallace. "Connoisseur of Chaos." The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Alfred A. Knopf, 1954, p. 215.
The import of this proverb that eventually things get so bad that people take radical steps to organize things. Unfortunately, historically when there have been periods of disorder and anarchy, a strongman or dictator usually takes over and provides the organization,
Wallace Stevens was an American 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.
