Life & Wisdom Quote by Wallace Stevens

Stevens doesn’t apologize for difficulty; he frames it as the engine of pleasure. “Everything is complicated” lands like a flat fact, almost bureaucratic in its certainty, then he swivels into a sly threat: remove complication and you don’t get clarity, you get boredom. That turn matters. He’s not romanticizing confusion for its own sake; he’s arguing that complexity is what keeps perception awake. Life isn’t interesting because it yields simple morals, and poetry isn’t valuable because it delivers a clean message. Both, for Stevens, are forms of active attention.

The subtext is an aesthetic manifesto disguised as common sense. Stevens is pushing back on the demand that art be easily “understood,” a pressure that intensified alongside modern mass culture and the early-20th-century appetite for plainspoken utility. If everything has to be quickly digestible, then imagination becomes customer service. Stevens refuses that bargain. He suggests that boredom is the true enemy, not obscurity; boredom is what happens when experience is flattened into slogans.

Context helps: Stevens wrote in a modernist moment when difficulty was often treated as elitism or evasion. His career as an insurance executive only sharpens the irony: the man paid to quantify risk insists that the world won’t be reduced. The line also defends poetry’s right to be more than decoration. Complication isn’t a barrier between writer and reader; it’s the terrain where meaning actually has room to move.