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Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints
Of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
Wallace Stevens
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To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on
The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart
That is the common, the bravest fundament, This is a facile exercise
Wallace Stevens
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If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
Wallace Stevens
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And as he came he saw that it was spring,
A time abhorrent to the nihilist Or searcher for the fecund minimum.
Wallace Stevens
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Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.
Wallace Stevens
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Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill;
Wallace Stevens
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What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Wallace Stevens
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Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,
Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,
Eliciting the still sustaining pomps
Of speech which are like music so profound
They seem an exaltation without sound.
Wallace Stevens
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Here is the bread of time to come,
Here is its actual stone. The bread
Will be our bread, the stone will be
Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except
The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.
Wallace Stevens
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The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art... in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it.
Wallace Stevens
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Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.
Wallace Stevens
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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
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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
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Exile desire
For what is not. This is the barrenness
Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.
Wallace Stevens
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A few things for themselves,
Florida, venereal soil,
Disclose to the lover.
Wallace Stevens
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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
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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
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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
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Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word, Beau linguist.
Wallace Stevens
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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
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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
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We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.
Wallace Stevens
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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
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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
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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
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Quote of the day
Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.
Georges Bataille
Wallace Stevens
Born:
October 2, 1879
Died:
August 2, 1955
(aged 75)
Bio:
Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.
Known for:
The Snow Man
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
The Man With the Blue Guitar
Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock
Domination of Black
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