Wallace Stevens Quotes
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One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough.
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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.
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Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
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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 poet is a god, or, the young poet is a god. The old poet is a tramp.
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As a man and woman meet and love forthwith. Perhaps there are moments of awakening, Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in whichWe more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep, As on an elevation, and behold The academies like structures in a mist.
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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.
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In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
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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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God is in me or else is not at all (does not exist).
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On a blue island in a sky-wide water The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear, Long after the planter’s death.
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The difficultest rigor is forthwith, On the image of what we see, to catch from that Irrational moment its unreasoning, As when the sun comes rising, when the sea Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed. Yet we are shaken by them as if they were. We reason about them with a later reason.
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The blue guitar And I are one.
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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.
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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?
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It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
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Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look Across the roofs as sigil and as ward And in your centre mark them and are cowed . . .
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These external regions, what do we fill them with Except reflections
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I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite.
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The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window Did not desire that feathery argentines Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them
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A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.
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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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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.'
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The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.