Wit & Attitude Quote by Wallace Stevens

Stevens pins New York to the page like an insect: mesmerizing, frenetic, and somehow dead on arrival. “A field of tireless and antagonistic interests” makes the city sound less like a home than a battlefield of motives, where energy isn’t communal but competitive. The genius is the pivot that follows: “undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal.” He concedes the seduction of the spectacle while insisting it’s a kind of hallucination produced by density, ambition, and the constant performance of being seen.

The closing image does the real damage. “Everybody is looking at everybody else” isn’t mere curiosity; it’s surveillance dressed up as social life. And then: “a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.” Mirrors promise self-knowledge, but in motion they only multiply surfaces. Stevens implies a metropolis where identity becomes feedback: you become what you think others see, then chase that reflection again. The crowd is “foolish” not because it’s uncultured, but because it confuses reflection for reality, appearance for presence.

Context matters: Stevens was a modernist poet who spent his working life in insurance, orbiting the era’s accelerating commerce without fully surrendering to it. Modernism loved the city’s speed and despised its emptiness; this line lands squarely in that tension. New York emerges as an engine of fascination that runs on antagonism and self-display, a place where the real is continuously deferred by the glare of other people’s eyes.