Wallace Stevens Quotes
-
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
-
The blue guitar And I are one.
-
The imagination is man's power over nature.
-
The poet is a god, or, the young poet is a god. The old poet is a tramp.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
-
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
-
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.
-
My candle burned alone in an immense valley. Beams of the huge night converged upon it, Until the wind blew. Then beams of the huge night Converged upon its image, Until the wind blew.
-
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
-
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.
-
A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.
-
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.'
-
One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
They married well because the marriage-place Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell. They were love’s characters come face to face.
-
Death is the mother of beauty
-
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
-
These external regions, what do we fill them with Except reflections
-
Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look Across the roofs as sigil and as ward And in your centre mark them and are cowed . . .