Wallace Stevens Quotes
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The fluctuations of certainty, the change Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.
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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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Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.
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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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Like a page of music, like an upper air, Like a momentary color, in which swans Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences. The west wind was the music, the motion, the force To which the swans curveted, a will to change, A will to make iris frettings on the blank.
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If to serenade almost to man Is to miss, by that, things as they are, Say that it is the serenade Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
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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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Perhaps, The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, But he that of repetition is most master.
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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 grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.
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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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The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,Beyond which fact could not progress as fact. Thereon the learning of the man conceived Once more night’s pale illuminations, goldBeneath, far underneath, the surface of His eye and audible in the mountain of His ear, the very material of his mind.
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I can Do all that angels can. I enjoy like them, Like men besides, like men in light secluded, Enjoying angels.
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They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture Pleased that the irrational is rational,Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street, I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.
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The President ordains the bee to be Immortal. The President ordains.
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I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks
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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
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A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.
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The first idea was not our own. Adam In Eden was the father of Descartes And eve made air the mirror of herself,Of her sons and of her daughters.
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A breath upon her hand Muted the night. She turned - A cymbal crashed, Amid roaring horns.
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The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
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The point of vision and desire are the same.
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What is there in life except one's ideas. Good air, good friend, what is there in life? Is it ideas that I believe?
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Poetry is the subject of the poem, From this the poem issues and To this returns. Between the two, Between issue and return, there is An absence in reality, Things as they are. Or so we say. But are these separate?