Wallace Stevens Quotes
-
The poem goes form the poet’s gibberish to The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.
-
An unaffected man in a negative light Could not have borne his labor nor have died Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
-
A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.
-
Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns, Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous, Eliciting the still sustaining pomps Of speech which are like music so profound They seem an exaltation without sound.
-
Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look Across the roofs as sigil and as ward And in your centre mark them and are cowed . . .
-
I play. But this is what I think.
-
For the poet, the imagination is paramount, and . . . he dwells apart in his imagination, as the philosopher dwells in his reason, and as the priest dwells in his belief … The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.'
-
A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one.
-
Light the first light of evening, as in a room In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good.
-
O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you?
-
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
-
The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse Suggested that, at the final funeral, The music halted and the horse stood still.
-
Is there a poem that never reaches words And one that chaffers the time away? Is the poem both peculiar and general? There’s a meditation there, in which there seemsTo be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or Not apprehended well. Does the poet Evade us, as in a senseless element?
-
Death is the mother of beauty
-
What is divinity if it can comeOnly in silent shadows and in dreams?
-
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
-
The poet is a god, or, the young poet is a god. The old poet is a tramp.
-
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
-
Music falls on the silence like a sense, A passion that we feel, not understand.
-
Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird.