Wallace Stevens Quotes
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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 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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The imagination is man's power over nature.
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Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
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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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The President has apples on the table And barefoot servants round him, who adjust The curtains to a metaphysical 't'
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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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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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What is beyond the cathedral, outside, Balances with nuptial song. So it is to sit and to balance things To and to and to the point of still, To say of one mask it is like, To say of another it is like, To know that the balance does not quite rest, That the mask is strange, however like.
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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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This was their ceremonial hymn: Anon We loved but would no marriage make. Anon The one refused the other one to take, Foreswore the sipping of the marriage wine.
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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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A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
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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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I placed a jar in Tennessee And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose upon it, And sprawled around, no longer wild.
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Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
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One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough.
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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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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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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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Place honey on the altars and die, You lovers that are bitter at heart.
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It is not in the premise that reality Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses A dust, a force that traverses a shade.
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Should there be a question of returning or Of death in memory’s dream? Is spring a sleep?This warmth is for lovers at last accomplishing Their love, this beginning, not resuming, this Booming and booming of the new-come bee.
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Here is the bread of time to come, Here is its actual stone. The bread Will be our bread, the stone will be Our bed and we shall sleep by night. We shall forget by day, except The moments when we choose to play The imagined pine, the imagined jay.