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.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Poetry
Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Civilization
Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol? It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
—Wallace Stevens
Opusculum paedagogicum
The pears are not viols,
Nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.
They are yellow forms
Composed of curves
Bulging toward the base.
They are touched red.
They are not flat surfaces
Having curved outlines.
They are round
Tapering toward the top.
In the way they are modelled
There are bits of blue.
A hard dry leaf hangs
From the stem.
The yellow glistens.
It glistens with various yellows,
Citrons, oranges and greens
Flowering over the skin.
The shadows of the pears
Are blobs on the green cloth.
The pears are not seen
As the observer wills.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Art
The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.
—Wallace Stevens
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Truth, Walking, Self-Discovery
The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Philosophy
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Thoughts, Thought
They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Music
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Snow
To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Imagination
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.
—Wallace Stevens
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Books, Literature
The bread of life is better than any souffle.
—Wallace Stevens
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Seasons, Spring
The genuine artist is never “true to life.” He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Reality
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Perception
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
—Wallace Stevens
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one’s meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Reality
The imagination is man’s power over nature.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Imagination
Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Death
One cannot spend one’s time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
—Wallace Stevens
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream
—Wallace Stevens
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Photography
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Perception
I can’t make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Proverbs, Mankind, Man
Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Poetry
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Philosophy, Philosophers
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Poetry
As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Books, Literature
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Stanley Kunitz American Poet
- Mark Van Doren American Poet, Critic
- Howard Nemerov American Poet, Novelist
- Conrad Aiken American Poet, Novelist
- Archibald MacLeish American Poet, Dramatist
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Theodore Roethke American Poet
- Robert Frost American Poet
- Marianne Moore American Poet
- Sylvia Plath American Poet, Novelist
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