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Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens Quotes

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Famous Wallace Stevens Quotes

“Poetry is a satisfying of the desire for resemblance. As the mere satisfying of a desire, it is pleasurable. But poetry if it did nothing but satisfy a desire would not rise above the level of many lesser things. Its singularity is that in the act of satisfying the desire for resemblance it touches the sense of reality, it enhances the sense of reality, heightens it, intensifies it.”

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Book:The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
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“It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do wIth our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.”

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Book:The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
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“…the imagination gives to everything that it touches a peculiarity, and it seems to me that the peculiarity of the imagination is nobility, of which there are many degrees. This inherent nobility is the natural source of another, which our extremely headstrong generation regards as false and decadent. I mean that nobility which is our spiritual height and depth; and while I know how difficult it is to express it, nevertheless I am bound to give a sense of it. Nothing could be more evasive and inaccessible. Nothing distorts itself and seeks disguise more quickly. There is a shame of disclosing it and in its definite presentations a horror of it. But there it is.”

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Book:The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
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“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.”

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Book:Transport to Summer
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“The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain There 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.”

Poetry
Author:Wallace Stevens
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“It was when I said, “There is no such thing as the truth,” That the grapes seemed fatter. The fox ran out of his hole. You . . . You said “There are many truths, But they are not parts of a truth.” Then the tree, at night, began to change, Smoking through green and smoking blue. We were two figures in a wood. We said we stood alone. It was when I said, “Words are not forms of a single word. In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts. The world must be measured by eye”; It was when you said, “The idols have seen lots of poverty, Snakes and gold and lice, But not the truth”; It was at that time, that the silence was largest And longest, the night was roundest, The fragrance of the autumn warmest, Closest and strongest.”

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Book:The Collected Poems
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