Wallace Stevens Quotes

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.

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

What's down below is in the past
Like last night's crickets, far below.

The mind is the great poem of winter, the man,
Who, to find what will suffice,
Destroys romantic tenements
Of rose and ice ...

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.

The death of one god is the death of all.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

What is there in life except one's ideas,
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?

Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The boughs of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world

Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.

Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.

The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.

The lion sleeps in the sun.
its nose on its paws.
it can kill a man.

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice

I have said no
To everything, in order to get at myself.
I have wiped away moonlight like mud ...

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.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say. That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way. The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.

Poetry increases the feeling for reality.

The law of chaos is the law of ideas,
Of improvisations and seasons of belief.
Ideas are men. The mass of meaning and
The mass of men are one. Chaos is not
The mass of meaning. It is three or four
Ideas, or, say, five men or, possibly, six.
In the end, these philosophic assassins pull
Revolvers and shoot each other. One remains.
The mass of meaning becomes composed again.

The mind is smaller than the eye.

Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses -
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon -
Rationalists would wear sombreros.

Was he to bray this in profoundest brass
Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems?
Was he to company vastest things defunct
With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky?
Scrawl a tragedian's testament? Prolong
His active force in an inactive dirge,
Which, let the tall musicians call and call,
Should merely call him dead? Pronounce amen
Through choirs infolded to the outmost clouds?
Because he built a cabin who once planned
Loquacious columns by the ructive sea?
Because he turned to salad-beds again?

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.

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

It is never the thing but the version of the thing.

This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out
Of dirt ... It is not possible for the moon
To blot this with its dove-winged blendings.

All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.

Man is an eternal sophomore.

A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order.
These two things are one.

Sombre as fir trees, liquid cats
Moved in the grass without a sound.
They did not know the grass went round.
The cats had cats and the grass turned gray
And the world had worlds, ai, this-a-way:
The grass turned green and the grass turned gray.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

The word is the making of the world

Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.

In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts it becomes an epidemic. p901

Disillusion is the last illusion.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

Realism is a corruption of reality.

The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.

The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.

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.

The death of Satan was a tragedy
For the imagination.

The way through the world
Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

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?

Poetry is a finikin thing of air
That lives uncertainly and not for long
Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

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.

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On on another, as Logos depends
On Eros, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.
Music falls on the silence like a sense
A passion that we feel, not understand.
Morning and afternoon are clasped together
And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away together as one in the greenest body.

The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one's desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair.

All history is modern history.

The imagination is man's power over nature.

Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

If sex were all, then every trembling hand
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.

After a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.

The truth is that there comes a time
When we can mourn no more over music
That is so much motionless sound

In a world of universal poverty
The philosophers alone will be fat
Against the autumn winds
In an autumn that will be perpetual.

Sunday Morning

I

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

II

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

III

Jove in the clouds had his inh

Life is not free from its forms.

There is a perfect rout of characters in every man - and every man is like an actor's trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.

It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.

A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.

How red the rose that is the soldier

The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.

I am and have a being and play a part.

The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes
Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism
Of machine within machine within machine.

Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.

From From the Journal of Crispin

There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams
That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs
Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not
The oncoming fantasies of better birth.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.

Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.
Use dusky words and dusky images.
Darken your speech.
Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,
But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,
Conceiving words,
As the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence,
And out of their droning sibilants makes
A serenade.

How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality. The mortal no
Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.

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.

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.

The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become.

On a few words of what is real in the world
I nourish myself. I defend myself against
Whatever remains.

Unless we believe in the hero, what is there
To believe? Incisive what, the fellow
Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud ...

A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.

Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.

She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.

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.

Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.

One's ignorance is one's chief asset.

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.

The imperfect is our paradise.

True villains are extremely photogenic.

Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

Lunar Paraphrase
The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.
When, at the wearier end of November,
Her old light moves along the branches,
Feebly, slowly, depending upon them;
When the body of Jesus hangs in a pallor,
Humanly near, and the figure of Mary,
Touched on by hoar-frost, shrinks in a shelter
Made by the leaves, that have rotted and fallen;
When over the houses, a golden illusion
Brings back an earlier season of quiet
And quieting dreams in the sleepers in darkness
The moon is the mother of pathos and pity.

It matters, because everything we say
Of the past is description without place, a cast
Of the imagination, made in sound;
And because what we say of the future must portend,
Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to be
Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.

It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.

Like the Sweetness of Gardenias Mother, you died 15 years ago. pain, a rapier, cut until, finally, there was just peace like the sweetness of gardenias in the crystal vase on your yellow kitchen table. so fragrant. your voice lingers in my ear reminding, scolding, guiding a pleasant mantra of tenderness, magic words that move my palms, your palms. together we are molding, helping, creating. in the mirror I see your eyes, your beautiful brown circles looking back, so radiant. "don't forget me," you whispered the day you died. I won't.