“Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.”
Source: Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose
“In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American -- on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.”
Source: Letters of Wallace Stevens
“Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.”
Source: Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose
“Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.”
Source: Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose
“God is gracious to some very peculiar people.”
Source: Letters of Wallace Stevens
“Anything is beautiful if you say it is.”
Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
“Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.”
Source: Collected Poetry and Prose
“Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.”
“Poetry is a finikin thing of air
That lives uncertainly and not for long
Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.”
Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
“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.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“It is never the thing but the version of the thing:
The fragrance of the woman not her self,
Her self in her manner not the solid block,
The day in its color not perpending time,
Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord,
The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.”
Source: Selected poems
“The thinker as reader reads what has been written.
He wears the words he reads to look upon
Within his being.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.”
Source: The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
“In a world of universal poverty
The philosophers alone will be fat
Against the autumn winds
In an autumn that will be perpetual.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“Funest philosophers and ponderers,
Their evocations are the speech of clouds.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“What is there in life except one's ideas,
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?”
Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
“Tell X that speech is not dirty silence
Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.”
Source: Selected poems
“It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most.
It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.
This is the tragic accent of the scene.”
Source: Selected poems
“The mind is smaller than the eye.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“The mind is the great poem of winter, the man,
Who, to find what will suffice,
Destroys romantic tenements
Of rose and ice.”
Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
“The muddy rivers of spring
Are snarling
Under the muddy skies.
The mind is muddy.”
“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.”
Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
“It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked
And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.”
Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
“Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse
Without a rider on a road at night.
The mind sits listening and hears it pass.”
Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
“It is time that beats in the breast and it is time
That batters against the mind, silent and proud,
The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.”
Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
“The old brown hen and the old blue sky,
Between the two we live and die
The broken cartwheel on the hill.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“There's no such thing as life; or if there is,
It is faster than the weather, faster than
Any character. It is more than any scene:
Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“It may be that the ignorant man, alone,
Has any chance to mate his life with life
That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life
That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.”
Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
“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.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end,
The future might stop emerging out of the past,
Out of what is full of us; yet the search
And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.”
Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
“I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.”
“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.”
Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
“Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shrivelled forms
Crouched in the moonlight.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“The prologues are over. It is a question, now,
Of final belief. So, say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.”
“Day after day, throughout the winter,
We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason
In a world of wind and frost.”
Source: The Collected Poems of 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.”
Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
“One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow”
Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
“Cold is our element and winter's air
Brings voices as of lions coming down.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world.”
Source: The Emperor of Ice-Cream and Other Poems
“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.”
Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
“The physical world is meaningless tonight
And there is no other.”
Source: Collected Poetry and Prose
“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?”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“Revolution
Is the affair of logical lunatics.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“Imagination is the will of things. . . .”
Source: The Emperor of Ice-Cream and Other Poems
“The death of Satan was a tragedy
For the imagination.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes
Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism
Of machine within machine within machine.”
Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
“What is one man among so many men?
What are so many men in such a world?
Can one man think one thing and think it long?
Can one man be one thing and be it long?”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
