Wallace Stevens Quotes

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. ~ Wallace Stevens

And what's above is in the past
As sure as all the angels are. ~ Wallace Stevens

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

The point of vision and desire are the same. ~ Wallace Stevens

The windy sky
Cries out a literate despair. ~ Wallace Stevens

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of thing that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be ... ~ Wallace Stevens

Then the sea and heaven rolled as one and from the two came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue. ~ Wallace Stevens

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

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

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. ~ Wallace Stevens

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; / But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud. - WALLACE STEVENS, OF THE SURFACE OF THINGS ~ Rebecca Solnit

The mind is smaller than the eye. ~ Wallace Stevens

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

I

Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the selfsame sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.

Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna:

Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt

The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

from "Peter Quince at the Clavier ~ Wallace Stevens

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

Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through.
Have liberty not as the air within a grave
Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native,
In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate. ~ Wallace Stevens

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

The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world ... ~ Wallace Stevens

I like Rhine wine, blue grapes, good cheese, endive and lots of books, etc., etc., etc., as much as I like supreme fiction. ~ Wallace Stevens

Life is not free from its forms. ~ Wallace Stevens

The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father,
Because, in chief, it, only, can defend
Against itself. At its mercy, we depend
Upon it. ~ Wallace Stevens

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

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 ~ Wallace Stevens

The death of one god is the death of all. ~ Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world ~ Wallace Stevens

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

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

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

Poetry increases the feeling for reality. ~ Wallace Stevens

God is in me or else is not at all. ~ Wallace Stevens

The ultimate self-effacement
is not the pretense of the minimal,
but the jocular considerations of the maximal
in the manner of Wallace Stevens. ~ Mark Strand

Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints. ~ Wallace Stevens

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art. ~ Wallace Stevens

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

New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors. ~ Wallace Stevens

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

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

After a lustre of the moon, we say
We have not the need of any paradise,
We have not the need of any seducing hymn. ~ Wallace Stevens

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

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"


I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

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

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

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

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut < ~ Wallace Stevens

It is the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science teaching. There are more than seven-times-seven types of ambiguity in science, awaiting analysis. The poetry of Wallace Stevens is crystal-clear alongside the genetic code. ~ Lewis Thomas

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

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there. ~ Wallace Stevens

The winter is made and you have to bear it,
The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind,
For all the thoughts of summer that go with it
In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags ... ~ Wallace Stevens

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. ~ Wallace Stevens

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

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

I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office. ~ Wallace Stevens

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. ~ Wallace Stevens

We live in an old chaos of the sun. ~ Wallace Stevens

I am completing a book I began back in 2002 called 'Poems in the Manner of.' 'The Matador of Metaphor' is from this manuscript. It is an homage to Wallace Stevens that appropriates certain of his techniques. ~ David Lehman

Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods. ~ Wallace Stevens

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom. ~ Wallace Stevens

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

From the opening lines of the play Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise

All you need,
To find poetry,
Is to look for it with a lantern. ~ Wallace Stevens

I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door. ~ Wallace Stevens

Disillusion is the last illusion. ~ Wallace Stevens

There may be always a time of innocence.
There is never a place. ~ Wallace Stevens

You know that the nucleus of a time is not
The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind
Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed
As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins
Nor stand there making orotund consolations.
He shares the confusions of intelligence. ~ Wallace Stevens

Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens. ~ Dana Gioia

The sea
Severs not only lands but also selves. ~ Wallace Stevens

From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist. ~ Wallace Stevens

I thought how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes, barrens, wilds. It still dwarfs, terrifies, crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens, orchards and fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless. ~ Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the scholar's art. ~ Wallace Stevens

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

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

Already the new-born children interpret love
In the voices of mothers. ~ Wallace Stevens

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. ~ Wallace Stevens

For several years I've been writing 100-word pieces. More recently I've been putting them together in groups of two and three. I don't see them as sequences, but rather as companion pieces, the way that diptychs often work. The idea comes originally from the paintings of Michael Venezia who places blocks of painted wood next to each other. Proximity is a godsend. The quote is from Wallace Stevens. ~ Jim Moore

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

The wind,
Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry,
Came bluntly thundering, more terrible
Than the revenge of music on bassoons. ~ Wallace Stevens

It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self. ~ Wallace Stevens

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

The poet's function is to make his imagination ... become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives. ~ Wallace Stevens

The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heap ~ Wallace Stevens

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore. ~ Wallace Stevens

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. ~ Wallace Stevens

The night
Makes everything grotesque. Is it because
Night is the nature of man's interior world? ~ Wallace Stevens

THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATE

I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations - one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds. ~ Wallace Stevens

A change of style is a change of meaning. ~ Wallace Stevens

It is never the thing but the version of the thing. ~ Wallace Stevens

It was soldier's went marching over the rocks,
and still they came in watery flocks,
because it was spring and the birds had to come,
No doubt that soldier's had to be marching,
and that the drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling ~ Wallace Stevens

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

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

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof. ~ Wallace Stevens

You both love Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Hawthorne and Melville, Flaubert and Stendahl, but at that stage of your life you cannot stomach Henry James, while Gwyn argues that he is the giant of giants, the colossus who makes all other novelists look like pygmies. You are in complete harmony about the greatness of Kafka and Beckett, but when you tell her that Celine belongs in their company, she laughs at you and calls him a fascist maniac. Wallace Stevens yes, but next in line for you is William Carlos Williams, not T.S. Eliot, whose work Gwyn can recite from memory. You defend Keaton, she defends Chaplin, and while you both howl at the sight of the Marx Brothers, your much-adored W.C. Fields cannot coax a single smile from her. Truffaut at his best touches you both, but Gwyn finds Godard pretentious and you don't, and while she lauds Bergman and Antonioni as twin masters of the universe, you reluctantly tell her that you are bored by their films. No conflicts about classical music, with J.S. Bach at the top of the list, but you are becoming increasingly interested in jazz, while Gwyn still clings to the frenzy of rock and roll, which has stopped saying much of anything to you. She likes to dance, and you don't. She laughs more than you do and smokes less. She is a freer, happier person than you are, and whenever you are with her, the world seems brighter and more welcoming, a place where your sullen, introverted self can almost begin to feel at home. ~ Paul Auster

Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams? ~ Wallace Stevens

I was helpless in trying to return people's kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that's for sure. Cruelty isn't that hard to understand. I had no trouble comprehending why the phone company wanted to screw me over; they just wanted to steal some money, it was nothing personal. That's the way of the world. It made me mad, but it didn't make me feel stupid. If anything, it flattered my intelligence. Accepting all that kindness, though, made me feel stupid.

Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don't live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us, and it gets us all the way it got Renee, but we don't burn each other, not always. We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don't know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don't need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can't. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people's psychic hearts. ~ Rob Sheffield

One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls,
When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops.
He mocks the guinea, challenges
The crow, inciting various modes.
The sparrow requites one, without intent. ~ Wallace Stevens

The imperfect is our paradise. ~ Wallace Stevens

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. ~ Wallace Stevens

Realism is a corruption of reality. ~ Wallace Stevens

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly. ~ Wallace Stevens

To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest. ~ Wallace Stevens

It is good death
That puts an end to evil death and dies. ~ Wallace Stevens

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. ~ Wallace Stevens

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

One of the things that I have learned, one of the attainments of the long travails and tribulations, has been, I think, coming to a simpler sense of myself that I think correlates to a simpler sense of others. Something closer to what I now call the simple sense of being human, a sort of Wallace Stevens-esque formulation. I know that I can reach this in the audience, because when they start hearing a story, they wake up in this very clear, simple way. Almost like children. It's the same thing: a child asks, "What's going to happen next?" When they sense that a story is being told to them, they wake up. When they sense that it's not being told anymore, they lose interest. I take this very seriously, because the sacred trust that allows openness is the precondition of the kind of exchange I want to have, the kind of relationship that I want to have. I don't want to test that simple sense of being human. I don't want to transform it. ~ Ayad Akhtar

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. ~ Wallace Stevens

For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. ~ Wallace Stevens