Wallace Stevens Quotes
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A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.
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Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the self-same sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound; And thus it is that what I feel, Here in this room, desiring you, Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, Is music.
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I know that timid breathing. Where Do I begin and end? And where, As I strum the thing, do I pick up That which momentously declares Itself not to be I and yet Must be. It could be nothing else.
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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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Upon the bank, she stood In the cool Of spent emotions. She felt, among the leaves, The dew Of old devotions.
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His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick, Inevitably modulating, in the blood. And war for war, each has its gallant kind. How simply the fictive hero becomes the real; How gladly with proper words the solider dies, If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.
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I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite.
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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.
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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.
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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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It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect The final elegance, not to console Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.
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One of the limits of reality Presents itself in Oley when the hay, Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.… Things stop in that direction and since they stop The direction stops and we accept what is As good. The utmost must be good and is…
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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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Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose The suitable amours. Time will write them down.
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A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.
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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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Death is the mother of beauty
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Tonight the lilacs magnify The easy passion, the ever-ready love Of the lover that lies within us and we breatheAn odor evoking nothing, absolute. We encounter in the dead middle of the night The purple odor, the abundant bloom.
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Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was A name for something that never could be named. There was a project for the sun and is.There is a project for the sun. The sun Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be In the difficulty of what it is to be.
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In solitude the trumpets of solitude Are not of another solitude resounding; A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.
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Struggling toward impassioned choirs, Crying among the clouds, enraged By gold antagonists in air - I know my lazy, leaden twang Is like the reason in a storm; And yet it brings the storm to bear. I twang it out and leave it there.
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The sea returns upon the men, The fields entrap the children, brick Is a weed and all the flies are caught, Wingless and withered, but living alive. The discord merely magnified. Deeper within the belly's dark Of time, time grows upon the rock.
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In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American - on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.