Wallace Stevens Quotes
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The poem goes form the poet’s gibberish to The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.
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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.
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Let wise men piece the world together with wisdom Or poets with holy magic. Hey-di-ho.
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One's ignorance is one's chief asset.
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The imagination is man's power over nature.
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Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
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The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.
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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. So gardens die, their meek breath scenting The cowl of winter, done repenting. So maidens die, to the auroral Celebration of a maiden's choral.
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The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
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Money is a kind of poetry.
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The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
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I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
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My house has changed a little in the sun. The fragrance of the magnolias come close, False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.
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Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
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The words they spoke were voices that she heard. She looked at them and saw them as they were And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.
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What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
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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.
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All history is modern history.
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The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance Are parts of apotheosis, appropriate And of its nature, the idiom thereof.
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Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
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Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
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This will make widows wince. But fictive things Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.
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If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
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Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms, Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.