Wallace Stevens Quotes
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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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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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A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.
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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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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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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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A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one.
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I play. But this is what I think.
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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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Let wise men piece the world together with wisdom Or poets with holy magic. Hey-di-ho.
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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.
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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?
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I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
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The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse Suggested that, at the final funeral, The music halted and the horse stood still.
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Death is the mother of beauty
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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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The poem goes form the poet’s gibberish to The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.
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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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A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
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What is divinity if it can comeOnly in silent shadows and in dreams?
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Music falls on the silence like a sense, A passion that we feel, not understand.
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It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
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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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A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.