70 Quotes & Sayings By Wallace Stevens

The Poem That Took The Place Of A MountainThere it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in his own direction How he had recomposed the pines, Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds For the outlook that would be right, Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: The exact rock where his inexactness Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged Where he could lie and gazing down at the sea, Recognize his unique and solitary home. Wallace Stevens

The Plot Against The GiantFirst GirlWhen this yokel comes maundering, Whetting his hacker, I shall run before him, Diffusing the civilest odors Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers. It will check him. Second GirlI shall run before him, Arching cloths besprinkled with colors As small as fish-eggs. The threads Will abash him. Third GirlOh, la..le pauvre! I shall run before him, With a curious puffing. He will bend his ear then. I shall whisper Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals. It will undo him. Wallace Stevens

All history is modern history. 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

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

The mind can never be satisfied. Wallace Stevens

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

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor. Wallace Stevens

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. Wallace Stevens

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. Wallace Stevens

He heard her low accord, Half prayer and half ditty, And He felt a subtle quiver, That was not heavenly love, Or pity. This is not writ In any book. Wallace Stevens

The villages slept as the capable man went down, Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive, The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds, As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed, Impatient of the bells and midnight forms, Rode over the picket docks, rode down the road, And, capable, created in his mind, Eventual victor, out of the martyr's bones, The ultimate elegance: the imagined land. Wallace Stevens

THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATEIClear 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. I I Say even that this complete simplicity Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed The evilly compounded, vital IAnd 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. I I I 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

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

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

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking. Wallace Stevens

If there must be a god in the house, must be, Saying things in the rooms and on the stair, Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor, Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly. Wallace Stevens

Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of themoon. It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing hecould be told. It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know. It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak. Wallace Stevens

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 Wallace Stevens

Consider the odd morphology of regret. Wallace Stevens

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. Wallace Stevens

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

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

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

We say God and the imagination are one .. .How high that highest candle lights the dark. Wallace Stevens

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

It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound. Wallace Stevens

Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking from The weight of primary noon ... Wallace Stevens

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good. Wallace Stevens

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

The poet is the priest of the invisible. Wallace Stevens

The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself. Wallace Stevens

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires. Wallace Stevens

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature. Wallace Stevens

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

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise! Wallace Stevens

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

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

We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark. Wallace Stevens

The imagination is man's power over nature. Wallace Stevens

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

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

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

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. Wallace Stevens

Money is a kind of poetry. Wallace Stevens

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

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs. Wallace Stevens