Wallace Stevens Quotes
-
It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.
-
She walked upon the grass, Still quavering. The winds were like her maids, On timid feet, Fetching her woven scarves, Yet wavering.
-
It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect The final elegance, not to console Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.
-
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.
-
I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite.
-
To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as having something to say.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.
-
In being more than an exception, part,Though an heroic part, of the commonal. The major abstraction is the commonal, The inanimate, difficult visage.
-
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.
-
Upon the bank, she stood In the cool Of spent emotions. She felt, among the leaves, The dew Of old devotions.
-
One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The bees came booming as if they had never gone, As if hyacinths had never gone. We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy. This meansNight-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.
-
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...
-
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.
-
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.
-
Clothe me entire in the final filament, So that I tremble with such love so known And myself am precious for your perfecting.