Wallace Stevens Quotes
In poetry you must love the words the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to l...
Show MoreDeath is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our d...
Show MoreMoney is a kind of poetry.
I know noble accentsAnd lucid, inescapable rhythms;But I know, too,That the blackbird is involvedIn ...
Show MoreFor the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /Nothing that is not ther...
Show MoreAccuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
The mind can never be satisfied.
Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking fromThe weight of primary ...
Show MoreFrom oriole to crow, note the declineIn music. Crow is realist. But, then,Oriole, also, may be reali...
Show MoreConceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
The death of one god is the death of all.
I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.
I do not know which to prefer,The beauty of inflectionsOr the beauty of innuendosThe blackbird whist...
Show MoreIn poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to l...
Show MoreIt was soldier's went marching over the rocks,and still they came in watery flocks,because it was sp...
Show MoreReality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
If there must be a god in the house, must be,Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,Let him mov...
Show MoreIt is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.
Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.Use dusky words and dusky images.Darken your speech.Spea...
Show MoreThe law of chaos is the law of ideas,Of improvisations and seasons of belief.Ideas are men. The mass...
Show MoreHe heard her low accord,Half prayer and half ditty,And He felt a subtle quiver,That was not heavenly...
Show MoreThe villages slept as the capable man went down,Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were a...
Show MoreConsider the odd morphology of regret.
The exceeding brightness of this early sunMakes me conceive how dark I have become.
Poetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lus...
Show MoreWeight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of themoon.It was only a glass because he looked ...
Show MoreWe say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
The way through the worldIs more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
After the leaves have fallen, we returnTo a plain sense of things. It is as ifWe had come to an end ...
Show MoreAll history is modern history.
We live in an old chaos of the sun.
After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing els...
Show MoreMost modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, ...
Show MoreThe Plot Against The GiantFirst GirlWhen this yokel comes maundering,Whetting his hacker,I shall run...
Show MoreLet be be finale of seem.The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
One must read poetry with one's nerves.
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance r...
Show MoreIt is deep January. The sky is hard.The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.It is in this solitude, a sy...
Show MoreThe Poem That Took The Place Of A MountainThere it was, word for word, The poem that took the place ...
Show MoreI placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill.
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
A pear should come to the table popped with juice,Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On termsLi...
Show MoreDeath is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by ...
Show MoreIt matters, because everything we sayOf the past is description without place, a castOf the imaginat...
Show MoreThe truth is that there comes a time When we can mourn no more over music That is so much motionless...
Show MoreA poem is a meteor.
There will never be an endTo this droning of the surf.
Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade thro...
Show MorePoetry is the scholar's art.
THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATEIClear water in a brilliant bowl, Pink and white carnations. The lightIn the...
Show MoreI do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird...
Show MorePoor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
A change of style is a change of meaning.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the thr...
Show MoreThe poem must resist the intelligenceAlmost successfully.
After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as pa...
Show MorePoetry is an abstraction bloodied.
The imagination is man's power over nature.
There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of s...
Show MoreWe say God and the imagination are one . . .How high that highest candle lights the dark.
