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Wallace Stevens
261 quotes
“The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One might have thought of sight, but who could think Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees? Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound, But the dark italics it could not propound. And out of what sees and hears and out Of what one feels, who could have thought to make So many selves, so many sensuous worlds, As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming With the metaphysical changes that occur, Merely in living as and where we live.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To get at the thing Without gestures is to get at it as Idea.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am the angel of reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) first seen 1949 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Angel Surrounded by Paysans" (1949)
“We keep coming back and coming back To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns That fall upon it out of the wind.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A more severe, More harassing master would extemporize Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory Of poetry is the theory of life, As it is, in the intricate evasions of as, In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness, The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not in the premise that reality Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses A dust, a force that traverses a shade.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Reality is the beginning not the end, Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega, Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And one trembles to be so understood and, at last, To understand, as if to know became The fatality of seeing things too well.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the poet, the imagination is paramount, and ... he dwells apart in his imagination, as the philosopher dwells in his reason, and as the priest dwells in his belief … The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art... in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What the poet has in mind ... is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination. The poet tries to exemplify it, in part as I have tried to exemplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The paramount relation between poetry and painting today, between modern man and modern art, is simply this: that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The humble are they that move about the world with the lure of the real in their hearts.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the limits of reality Presents itself in Oley when the hay, Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene. * * * Things stop in that direction and since they stop The direction stops and we accept what is As good. The utmost must be good and is.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let’s see the very thing and nothing else. Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight. Burn everything not part of it to ash. Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky Without evasion by a single metaphor. Look at it in its essential barrenness And say this, this is the centre that I seek.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Exile desire For what is not. This is the barrenness Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Light the first light of evening, as in a room In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark. Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A bird's cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That scrawny cry — It was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun, Surrounded by its choral rings, Still far away. It was like A new knowledge of reality.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Total grandeur of a total edifice, Chosen by an inquisitor of structures For himself. He stops upon this threshold As if the design of all his words takes form And frame from thinking and is realized.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let wise men piece the world together with wisdom Or poets with holy magic. Hey-di-ho.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) first seen 1932 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Proverbs", from Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects (1932–1937)
“To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Two or Three Ideas" (1951)
“Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All history is modern history.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All poetry is experimental poetry.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The imagination is one of the forces of nature.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as having something to say.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man is an eternal sophomore.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The poet is a god, or, the young poet is a god. The old poet is a tramp.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“God is in me or else is not at all (does not exist).”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world is a force, not a presence.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source