Wallace Stevens Quotes
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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.
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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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One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough.
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At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A bird's cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind.
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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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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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The poet is a god, or, the young poet is a god. The old poet is a tramp.
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A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hellAnd bad the sheep carouse. Or so they said. Children in love with them brought early flowers And scattered them about, no two alike.
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Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
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The meeting of their shadows or that meet In a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay. But your war ends. And after it you return
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If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.
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Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade, And you, and you, bethou me as you blow, When in my coppice you behold me be.
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The poem, through candor, brings back a power again That gives a candid kind to everything.
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The President has apples on the table And barefoot servants round him, who adjust The curtains to a metaphysical 't'
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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 ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
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These external regions, what do we fill them with Except reflections
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Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
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There is a month, a year, there is a time In which majesty is a mirror of the self: I have not but I am and as I am, I am.
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A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
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Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction.
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One of the limits of reality Presents itself in Oley when the hay, Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.… Things stop in that direction and since they stop The direction stops and we accept what is As good. The utmost must be good and is…
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A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one.
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Place honey on the altars and die, You lovers that are bitter at heart.