Wallace Stevens Quotes
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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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Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction.
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Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words.
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One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough.
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Donna, donna, dark, Stooping in indigo gown And cloudy constellations, Conceal yourself or disclose Fewest things to the lover - A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit, A pungent bloom against your shade.
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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.
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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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To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as having something to say.
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She walked upon the grass, Still quavering. The winds were like her maids, On timid feet, Fetching her woven scarves, Yet wavering.
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Straight to the utmost crown of night he flew. The nothingness was a nakedness, a pointBeyond which thought could not progress as thought. He had to choose. But it was not a choice Between excluding things. It was not a choiceBetween, but of. He chose to include the things That in each other are included, the whole, The complicate, the amassing harmony.
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It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow. This gloom is the darkness of the sea.
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He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase,Or power of the wave, or deepened speech, Or a leaner being, moving in on him, Of greater aptitude and apprehension,As if the waves at last were never broken, As if the language suddenly, with ease, Said things it had laboriously spoken.
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The poem refreshes life so that we share, For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies Belief in an immaculate beginningAnd sends us, winged by an unconscious will, To an immaculate end.
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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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Eye without lid, mind without any dream -These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy, Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a birdOf stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you And you, bethou him and bethou. It is A sound like any other. It will end.
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The casual is not Enough. The freshness of transformation isThe freshness of a world. It is our own, It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves, And that necessity and that presentationAre rubbings of a glass in which we peer.
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In being more than an exception, part,Though an heroic part, of the commonal. The major abstraction is the commonal, The inanimate, difficult visage.
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It was enough for her that she remembered.
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We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.
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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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Be content - Expansions, diffusions - content to be The unspotted imbecile revery, The heraldic center of the world Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins, The amorist Adjective aflame...
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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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Clothe me entire in the final filament, So that I tremble with such love so known And myself am precious for your perfecting.
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The first idea is an imagined thing.