Wallace Stevens Quotes
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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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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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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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So poisonousAre the ravishments of truth, so fatal to The truth itself, the first idea becomes The hermit in a poet’s metaphors,Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.
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These external regions, what do we fill them with Except reflections
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Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird.
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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.
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Music falls on the silence like a sense, A passion that we feel, not understand.
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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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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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A thing final in itself and, therefore, good: One of the vast repetitions final in Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round And round and round, the merely going round, Until merely going round is a final good, The way wine comes at a table in a wood.
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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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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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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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Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose The suitable amours. Time will write them down.
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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 fire burns as the novel taught it how.
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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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I heard them cry - the peacocks. Was it a cry against the twilight Or against the leaves themselves Turning in the wind, Turning as the flames Turned in the fire, Turning as the tails of the peacocks Turned in the loud fire, Loud as the hemlocks Full of the cry of the peacocks? Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?
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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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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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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.
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The partaker partakes of that which changes him. The child that touches takes character from the thing, The body, it touches. The captain and his menAre one and the sailor and the sea are one.
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Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.