Book detail: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This volume brings together a selection of Wallace Stevens' most celebrated poems, offering readers a deep dive into the intricate and thought-provoking world of this influential American poet. Stevens' work is known for its abstract and philosophical nature, often exploring themes of time, death, and the nature of reality. The collection reflects his distinctive voice and innovative approach to poetry, making it a cornerstone of modernist literature.
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“The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“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
“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
“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
“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
“The mind is smaller than the eye.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“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
“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
“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
“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
“Cold is our element and winter's air
Brings voices as of lions coming down.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“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
“The death of Satan was a tragedy
For the imagination.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“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
“The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“The grackles sing avant the spring
Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly.
They sing right puissantly.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“Freedom is like a man who kills himself
Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife
Grows sharp in blood.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“The figures of the past go cloaked.
They walk in mist and rain and snow
And go, go slowly, but they go.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out
Of dirt . . . It is not possible for the moon
To blot this with its dove-winged blendings.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“The heavy trees,
The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust,
The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines
Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks
And far beyond the discords of the wind.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“On a few words of what is real in the world
I nourish myself. I defend myself against
Whatever remains.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“The sea
Severs not only lands but also selves.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“There may be always a time of innocence.
There is never a place.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“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.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“behold
The approach of him whom none believes,
Whom all believe that all believe,
A pagan in a varnished car.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“A languid janitor bears
His lantern through colonnades
And the architecture swoons.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“Make the visible a little hard to see.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“I am what is around me.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“It is never the thing but the version of the thing.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“Of the Surface of Things 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.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without menaing.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.”
Source: The Collected Poems of 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.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“The summer night is like a perfection of thought.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
“Tinsel in February, tinsel in August.
There are things in a man besides his reason.”
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens