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The clouds preceded us.There was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete.From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.
Wallace Stevens -
That scrawny cry - It was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun, Surrounded by its choral rings, Still far away. It was like A new knowledge of reality.
Wallace Stevens
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The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination.
Wallace Stevens -
Yet it depends on yours. The two are one. They are a plural, a right and left, a pair, Two parallels that meet if only in
Wallace Stevens -
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
Wallace Stevens -
The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.
Wallace Stevens -
With six meats and twelve wines or else without To walk another room...Monsieur and comrade, The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines.
Wallace Stevens -
The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.
Wallace Stevens
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Things as they are have been destroyed. Have I? Am I a man that is dead At a table on which the food is cold? Is my thought a memory, not alive? Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood And whichever it may be, is it mine?
Wallace Stevens -
There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel.
Wallace Stevens -
New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
Wallace Stevens -
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
Wallace Stevens -
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace Stevens -
All history is modern history.
Wallace Stevens
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This will make widows wince. But fictive things Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.
Wallace Stevens -
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
Wallace Stevens -
We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Wallace Stevens -
The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance Are parts of apotheosis, appropriate And of its nature, the idiom thereof.
Wallace Stevens -
The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
Wallace Stevens -
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
Wallace Stevens
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Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis, Incipit and a form to speak the word And every latent double in the word, Beau linguist.
Wallace Stevens -
Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
Wallace Stevens -
The monastic man is an artist.The philosopher Appoints man’s place in music, say, today. But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.And not to have is the beginning of desire. To have what is not is its ancient cycle.
Wallace Stevens -
Two things of opposite natures seem to depend On one another, as a man depends On a woman, day on night, the imaginedOn the real. This is the origin of change. Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace And forth the particulars of rapture come.
Wallace Stevens