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The fluctuations of certainty, the change Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.
Wallace Stevens -
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.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens -
A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.
Wallace Stevens -
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
Wallace Stevens -
The President ordains the bee to be Immortal. The President ordains.
Wallace Stevens -
So that's life, then: things are they are? It picks its way on the blue guitar. A million people on one string? And all their manner in the thing, And all their manner, right and wrong, And all their manner, weak and strong? And that's life, then: things as they are, This buzzing of the blue guitar.
Wallace Stevens -
The point of vision and desire are the same.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens -
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.
Wallace Stevens -
I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks
Wallace Stevens -
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.
Wallace Stevens -
Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.
Wallace Stevens -
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.
Wallace Stevens
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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
Wallace Stevens -
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
Wallace Stevens -
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.
Wallace Stevens -
I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite.
Wallace Stevens -
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take The opposing law and make a peristyle, And from the peristyle project a masque Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness, Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, Is equally converted into palms, Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm, Madame, we are where we began.
Wallace Stevens -
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.
Wallace Stevens
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After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.
Wallace Stevens -
Behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.
Wallace Stevens -
Without a name and nothing to be desired, If only imagined but imagined well.
Wallace Stevens -
I am the angel of reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.
Wallace Stevens