Wallace Stevens Quotes

368 Sourced Quotes

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.

Wallace Stevens
The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

Wallace Stevens
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

Wallace Stevens
She says, "But in contentment I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss." Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires.

Wallace Stevens
Perhaps
The truth depends on a walk around a lake, A composing as the body tires, a stop
To see hepatica, a stop to watch
A definition growing certain and A wait within that certainty, a rest
In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.
Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence

Wallace Stevens
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

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

Wallace Stevens
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
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

Wallace Stevens
That scrawny cry — It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

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.

Wallace Stevens
Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead
At a table on which the food is cold?
Is my thought a memory, not alive?
Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?

Wallace Stevens
Exile desire
For what is not. This is the barrenness
Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.

Wallace Stevens
A few things for themselves,
Florida, venereal soil,
Disclose to the lover.

Wallace Stevens
A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hell And bad the sheep carouse. Or so they said.
Children in love with them brought early flowers
And scattered them about, no two alike.

Wallace Stevens
A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round And round and round, the merely going round,
Until merely going round is a final good,
The way wine comes at a table in a wood.

Wallace Stevens
What chieftain, walking by himself, crying
Most miserable, most victorious, Does not see these separate figures one by one,
And yet see only one, in his old coat,
His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town, Looking for what was, where it used to be?

Wallace Stevens
Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word, Beau linguist.

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
Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night,
How is it I find you in difference, see you there
In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.

Wallace Stevens
We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.

Wallace Stevens
To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

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 am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.
Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,
Like watery words awash; like meanings said
By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not,
Myself, only half a figure of a sort,
A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition appareled in
Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulders and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

Wallace Stevens
Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.

Wallace Stevens
It is the celestial ennui of apartments That sends us back to the first idea.

Wallace Stevens
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Wallace Stevens
The President ordains the bee to be
Immortal. The President ordains.

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

Wallace Stevens
What the poet has in mind... is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination. The poet tries to exemplify it, in part as I have tried to exemplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives.

Wallace Stevens