Wallace Stevens Quotes
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We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.
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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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The first idea is an imagined thing.
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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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Man is an eternal sophomore.
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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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Each must the other take as sign, short sign To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements.
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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 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.
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These Are the music of meet resignation; these The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you To magnify, if in that drifting waste You are to be accompanied by more Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.
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Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.
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Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.
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In the green water, clear and warm, Susanna lay. She searched The touch of springs, And found Concealed imaginings. She sighed, For so much melody.
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The major abstraction is the idea of man And major man is its exponent, abler In the abstract than in his singular, More fecund as principle than particle
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The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
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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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It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.
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I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks
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The wind in which the dead leaves blow. Here I inhale profounder strength And as I am, I speak and move And things are as I think they are And say they are on the blue guitar.
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To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.
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I saw how the night came, Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks. I felt afraid. And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
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That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say.That savage of fire, That seed, Have it your way.The world is ugly, And the people are sad.
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There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain, So many clappers going without bells, That these bethous compose a heavenly gong. One voice repeating, one tireless chorister, The phrases of a single phrase, ke-ke, A single text, granite monotony