Wallace Stevens Quotes
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.
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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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What is divinity if it can comeOnly in silent shadows and in dreams?
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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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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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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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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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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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Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose The suitable amours. Time will write them down.
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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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I play. But this is what I think.
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It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.
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A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.