Wallace Stevens Quotes
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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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All history is modern history.
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Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
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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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The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
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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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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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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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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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Let wise men piece the world together with wisdom Or poets with holy magic. Hey-di-ho.
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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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Red-in-red repetitions never going Away,a little rusty, a little rouged, A little roughened and ruder, a crownThe eye could not escape, a red renown Blowing itself upon the tedious ear.
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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.
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Money is a kind of poetry.
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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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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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Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
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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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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.
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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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After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.
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One's ignorance is one's chief asset.
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First one beam, then another, then A thousand are radiant in the sky. Each is both star and orb; and day Is the riches of their atmosphere.
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The poem, through candor, brings back a power again That gives a candid kind to everything.