Top 100 Quotes About Wallace Stevens
#1. I am completing a book I began back in 2002 called 'Poems in the Manner of.' 'The Matador of Metaphor' is from this manuscript. It is an homage to Wallace Stevens that appropriates certain of his techniques.
David Lehman
#2. Sigh for me, night-wind, in the noisy leaves of the oak. / I am tired. Sleep for me, heaven over the hill. / Shout for me, loudly and loudly, joyful sun, when you rise.
Wallace Stevens
#3. People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.
Wallace Stevens
#4. There is a perfect rout of characters in every man - and every man is like an actor's trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things
Wallace Stevens
#5. The partaker partakes of that which changes him. The child that touches takes character from the thing, the body, it touches.
Wallace Stevens
#6. The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
Wallace Stevens
#7. The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world ...
Wallace Stevens
#8. To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.
Wallace Stevens
#9. He heard her low accord,
Half prayer and half ditty,
And He felt a subtle quiver,
That was not heavenly love,
Or pity.
This is not writ
In any book.
Wallace Stevens
#11. We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.
Wallace Stevens
#12. From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist.
Wallace Stevens
#13. One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow
Wallace Stevens
#14. The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.
Wallace Stevens
#15. A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
Wallace Stevens
#17. The winter is made and you have to bear it,
The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind,
For all the thoughts of summer that go with it
In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags ...
Wallace Stevens
#19. Diaries are very futile. I must be all dream or all deed. It is quite impossible for me to express any of the beauty I feel to half the degree I feel it; and yet it is a great pleasure to seize an impression and lock it up in words: you feel as if you had it safe forever.
Wallace Stevens
#20. The stars are putting on their glittering belts,
They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash
Like a great shadow's last embellishment
Wallace Stevens
#22. It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.
Wallace Stevens
#23. The thinker as reader reads what has been written.
He wears the words he reads to look upon
Within his being ...
Wallace Stevens
#25. What is there in life except one's ideas,
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Wallace Stevens
#26. Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
Wallace Stevens
#28. The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
Wallace Stevens
#29. Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.
Wallace Stevens
#30. The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.
Wallace Stevens
#31. Tinsel in February, tinsel in August.
There are things in a man besides his reason.
Wallace Stevens
#32. The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.
Wallace Stevens
#33. On a few words of what is real in the world
I nourish myself. I defend myself against
Whatever remains.
Wallace Stevens
#36. Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;
Wallace Stevens
#37. How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
Wallace Stevens
#38. From From the Journal of Crispin
There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams
That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs
Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not
The oncoming fantasies of better birth.
Wallace Stevens
#39. I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.
Wallace Stevens
#40. I was myself the compass of that sea:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
Wallace Stevens
#41. A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order.
These two things are one.
Wallace Stevens
#42. After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.
Wallace Stevens
#43. Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.
Wallace Stevens
#44. Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice
Wallace Stevens
#45. The prologues are over. It is a question, now,
Of final belief. So, say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
Wallace Stevens
#46. To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,
As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,
To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,
As if the paradise of meaning ceased
To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.
Wallace Stevens
#48. Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
Wallace Stevens
#49. The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.
Wallace Stevens
#50. I turn now not to the Bible but to Wallace Stevens
R.S. Thomas
#51. Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts it becomes an epidemic. p901
Wallace Stevens
#52. Beauty is momentary in the mind
The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing.
Wallace Stevens
#53. To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.
Wallace Stevens
#55. At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.
Wallace Stevens
#56. The heavy trees,
The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust,
The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines
Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.
Wallace Stevens
#57. Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Wallace Stevens
#58. The physical world is meaningless tonight
And there is no other.
Wallace Stevens
#59. Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
Wallace Stevens
#60. Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.
Wallace Stevens
#65. The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks
And far beyond the discords of the wind.
Wallace Stevens
#66. Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.
Wallace Stevens
#67. It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
Wallace Stevens
#68. I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.
Wallace Stevens
#69. You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.
David Denby
#74. How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality. The mortal no
Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.
Wallace Stevens
#75. Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.
Wallace Stevens
#76. To Wallace Stevens' post-Nietzschean formula 'God and the imagination are one,' these women poets would add a crucial third element: God and the imagination and my body are one.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker
#77. Day after day, throughout the winter,
We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason
In a world of wind and frost ...
Wallace Stevens
#79. Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.
Wallace Stevens
#80. Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.
Wallace Stevens
#82. Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.
Wallace Stevens
#83. Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
Wallace Stevens
#84. (Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.
Harold Bloom
#85. It is the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science teaching. There are more than seven-times-seven types of ambiguity in science, awaiting analysis. The poetry of Wallace Stevens is crystal-clear alongside the genetic code.
Lewis Thomas
#86. Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
Wallace Stevens
#87. After the final no there come a yes, and on that yes a future world depends.
Wallace Stevens
#88. The old brown hen and the old blue sky,
Between the two we live and die
The broken cartwheel on the hill.
Wallace Stevens
#89. The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes
Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism
Of machine within machine within machine.
Wallace Stevens
#90. The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become.
Wallace Stevens
#92. The subject matter ... is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are.
Wallace Stevens
#94. Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens
#97. A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.
Wallace Stevens
#98. Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination.
Wallace Stevens
#99. You know that the nucleus of a time is not
The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind
Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed
As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins
Nor stand there making orotund consolations.
He shares the confusions of intelligence.
Wallace Stevens
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