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Wallace Stevens
261 quotes
“So poisonousAre the ravishments of truth, so fatal to The truth itself, the first idea becomes The hermit in a poet’s metaphors,Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The monastic man is an artist. The philosopher Appoints man’s place in music, say, today. But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.And not to have is the beginning of desire. To have what is not is its ancient cycle.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the celestial ennui of apartments That sends us back to the first idea.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The poem, through candor, brings back a power again That gives a candid kind to everything.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And still the grossest iridescence of ocean Howls hoo and rises and howls hoo and falls.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The clouds preceded us.There was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete.From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look Across the roofs as sigil and as ward And in your centre mark them and are cowed.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not to be realized because not to Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because Not to be realized.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Without a name and nothing to be desired, If only imagined but imagined well.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My house has changed a little in the sun. The fragrance of the magnolias come close, False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It must be visible or invisible, Invisible or visible or both: A seeing and unseeing in the eye.The weather and the giant of the weather, Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air: An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps The truth depends on a walk around a lake,A composing as the body tires, a stop To see hepatica, a stop to watch A definition growing certain andA wait within that certainty, a rest In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake. Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a man and woman meet and love forthwith. Perhaps there are moments of awakening, Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in whichWe more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep, As on an elevation, and behold The academies like structures in a mist.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The first idea is an imagined thing.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis, Incipit and a form to speak the word And every latent double in the word, Beau linguist.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance Are parts of apotheosis, appropriate And of its nature, the idiom thereof.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Apotheosis is not The origin of the major man. He comes,Compact in invincible foils, from reason, Lighted at midnight by the studious eye, Swaddled in revery, the object ofThe hum of thoughts evaded in the mind.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My dame, sing for this person accurate songs.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He is and may be but oh! He is, he is, This foundling of the infected past, so bright, So moving in the manner of his hand.Yet look not at his colored eyes. Give him No names. Dismiss him from your images. The hot of him is purest in the heart.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In being more than an exception, part,Though an heroic part, of the commonal. The major abstraction is the commonal, The inanimate, difficult visage.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What chieftain, walking by himself, crying Most miserable, most victorious, Does not see these separate figures one by one, And yet see only one, in his old coat, His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town,Looking for what was, where it used to be?”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect The final elegance, not to console Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The President ordains the bee to be Immortal.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The President has apples on the table And barefoot servants round him, who adjust The curtains to a metaphysical "t".”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Should there be a question of returning or Of death in memory’s dream? Is spring a sleep?This warmth is for lovers at last accomplishing Their love, this beginning, not resuming, this Booming and booming of the new-come bee.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse Suggested that, at the final funeral, The music halted and the horse stood still.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing had happened because nothing had changed. Yet the General was rubbish in the end.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Two things of opposite natures seem to depend On one another, as a man depends On a woman, day on night, the imaginedOn the real. This is the origin of change. Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace And forth the particulars of rapture come.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Music falls on the silence like a sense, A passion that we feel, not understand.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In solitude the trumpets of solitude Are not of another solitude resounding; A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On a blue island in a sky-wide water The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear, Long after the planter’s death.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An unaffected man in a negative light Could not have borne his labor nor have died Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade, And you, and you, bethou me as you blow, When in my coppice you behold me be.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fluctuations of certainty, the change Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am the spouse. She took her necklace off And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt. I am the spouse, divested of bright gold, The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst, Beyond the burning body that I bear. I am the woman stripped more nakedly Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Clothe me entire in the final filament, So that I tremble with such love so known And myself am precious for your perfecting.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source