Welcome to our collection of quotes by Wallace Stevens
Wikipedia Summary for Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.
Stevens's first period of writing begins with his 1923 publication of the Harmonium collection, followed by a slightly revised and amended second edition in 1930. His second period occurred in the eleven years immediately preceding the publication of his Transport to Summer, when Stevens had written three volumes of poems including Ideas of Order, The Man with the Blue Guitar, Parts of a World, along with Transport to Summer. His third and final period of writing poems occurred with the publication of The Auroras of Autumn in the early 1950s followed by the release of his Collected Poems in 1954 a year before his death.
His best-known poems include "The Auroras of Autumn", "Anecdote of the Jar", "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock", "The Emperor of Ice-Cream", "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Sunday Morning", "The Snow Man", and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird".
A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world.
Poetry is a finicky thing of air that lives uncertainly and not for long, yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.
It may be that the ignorant man, alone, has any chance to mate his life with life.
Next to love is the desire for love.
How red the rose that is the soldier.
Longer Version:
How red the rose that is the soldier's wound, The wounds of many soldiers, the wounds of all The soldiers that have fallen, red in blood, The soldier of time grown deathless in great size.
We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.
Sad men made angels of the sun, and of
The moon they made their own attendant ghosts,
Which led them back to angels, after death.
One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven.
Longer Version:
One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order.
These two things are one.
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
God is gracious to some very peculiar people.
To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.
He thought often of the land from which he came,
How that whole country was a melon, pink
If seen rightly and yet a possible red.
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
I have said no
To everything, in order to get at myself.
I have wiped away moonlight like mud.
It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shrivelled forms
Crouched in the moonlight.
Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world.
My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called standing people.
Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.
From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist.
A poem is a meteor.
A pear should come to the table popped with juice,
Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms
Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.
A change of style is a change of meaning.
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;.
Behold
The approach of him whom none believes,
Whom all believe that all believe,
A pagan in a varnished car.
Realism is a corruption of reality.
Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.
An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.
Poetry is a means of redemption.
Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
Make the visible a little hard to see.
Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.
Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.
In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.
A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.
The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
Disillusion is the last illusion.
Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.
Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
Life is the elimination of what is dead.
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
Thus the theory of description matters most.
It is the theory of the word for those
For whom the word is the making of the world,
The buzzing world and lisping firmament.
The wind,
Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry,
Came bluntly thundering, more terrible
Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
Freedom is like a man who kills himself
Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife
Grows sharp in blood.
Of what is real I say,
Is it the old, the roseate parent or
The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else
The spirit and all ensigns of the self?
Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes
Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism
Of machine within machine within machine.
Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.
It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.
Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through.
Have liberty not as the air within a grave
Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native,
In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.
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.
On a few words of what is real in the world
I nourish myself. I defend myself against
Whatever remains.
The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.
The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.
If the hero is not a person, the emblem
Of him, even if Xenophon, seems
To stand taller than a person stands, has
A wider brow, large and less human
Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body
Of a primitive.
All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.
Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.
The thinker as reader reads what has been written.
He wears the words he reads to look upon
Within his being.
A languid janitor bears
His lantern through colonnades
And the architecture swoons.
Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.
The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.
The night
Makes everything grotesque. Is it because
Night is the nature of man's interior world?
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.
We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.
Above the forest of the parakeets,
A parakeet of parakeets prevails,
A pip of life amid a mort of tails.
Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow.
We say God and the imagination are one ...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
The prologues are over. It is a question, now,
Of final belief. So, say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
The figures of the past go cloaked.
They walk in mist and rain and snow
And go, go slowly, but they go.
To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,
As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,
To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,
As if the paradise of meaning ceased
To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.
Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.
The mind is the great poem of winter, the man,
Who, to find what will suffice,
Destroys romantic tenements
Of rose and ice.
I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.
If sex were all, then every trembling hand
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without menaing.
After a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.
Day after day, throughout the winter,
We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason
In a world of wind and frost.