Wallace Stevens Quotes

368 Sourced Quotes

This is old song
That will not declare itself...

Wallace Stevens
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

Wallace Stevens
On a blue island in a sky-wide water
The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,
Long after the planter's death.

Wallace Stevens
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

Wallace Stevens
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!

Wallace Stevens
It must be visible or invisible,
Invisible or visible or both:
A seeing and unseeing in the eye. The weather and the giant of the weather,
Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air:
An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought.

Wallace Stevens
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

Wallace Stevens
The hero is a feeling, a man seen
As if the eye was an emotion,
As if in seeing we saw our feeling
In the object seen.

Wallace Stevens
The dress of a woman of Lhassa,
in its place
is an invisible element of that place
made visible.

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.

Wallace Stevens
The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used. A free form does not assure freedom. As a form, it is just one more form. So that it comes to this, I suppose, that I believe in freedom regardless of form.

Wallace Stevens
The difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that
Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason.

Wallace Stevens
Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.

Wallace Stevens
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers In red weather.

Wallace Stevens
Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose
The suitable amours. Time will write them down.

Wallace Stevens
A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.

Wallace Stevens
Let wise men piece the world together with wisdom
Or poets with holy magic.
Hey-di-ho.

Wallace Stevens
I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite.

Wallace Stevens
After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

Wallace Stevens
Place honey on the altars and die,
You lovers that are bitter at heart.

Wallace Stevens
Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.
This arrival in the wild country of the soul,
All approaches gone, being completely there,
Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another. You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight
Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra
Hums and you say "The world in a verse, A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,
Women invisible in music and motion and color,"
After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.

Wallace Stevens
He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase, Or power of the wave, or deepened speech,
Or a leaner being, moving in on him,
Of greater aptitude and apprehension, As if the waves at last were never broken,
As if the language suddenly, with ease,
Said things it had laboriously spoken.

Wallace Stevens
It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.

Wallace Stevens
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.

Wallace Stevens
The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha,
It held the shivering, the shaken limbs,
Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.

Wallace Stevens
They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

Wallace Stevens
Unless we believe in the hero, what is there
To believe? Incisive what, the fellow
Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud....

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.

Wallace Stevens
Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.

Wallace Stevens
The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

Wallace Stevens