Wallace Stevens Quotes

368 Sourced Quotes

The wind,
Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry,
Came bluntly thundering, more terrible
Than the revenge of music on bassoons.

Wallace Stevens
The mind is the great poem of winter, the man,
Who, to find what will suffice,
Destroys romantic tenements
Of rose and ice....

Wallace Stevens
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.

Wallace Stevens
Above the forest of the parakeets,
A parakeet of parakeets prevails,
A pip of life amid a mort of tails.

Wallace Stevens
There may be always a time of innocence.
There is never a place.

Wallace Stevens
The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes
Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism
Of machine within machine within machine.

Wallace Stevens
How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality. The mortal no
Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.

Wallace Stevens
What's down below is in the past
Like last night's crickets, far below.

Wallace Stevens
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

Wallace Stevens
All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.

Wallace Stevens
After a lustre of the moon, we say
We have not the need of any paradise,
We have not the need of any seducing hymn.

Wallace Stevens
It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked
And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.

Wallace Stevens
The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father,
Because, in chief, it, only, can defend
Against itself. At its mercy, we depend
Upon it.

Wallace Stevens
Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.

Wallace Stevens
The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.

Wallace Stevens
Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through.
Have liberty not as the air within a grave
Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native,
In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.

Wallace Stevens
Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.

Wallace Stevens
Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world

Wallace Stevens
If sex were all, then every trembling hand
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.

Wallace Stevens
The night
Makes everything grotesque. Is it because
Night is the nature of man's interior world?

Wallace Stevens
Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.

Wallace Stevens
The figures of the past go cloaked.
They walk in mist and rain and snow
And go, go slowly, but they go.

Wallace Stevens
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

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.

Wallace Stevens
And what's above is in the past
As sure as all the angels are.

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.

Wallace Stevens
An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.

Wallace Stevens
It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shrivelled forms
Crouched in the moonlight.

Wallace Stevens
A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.

Wallace Stevens
It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most.
It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.
This is the tragic accent of the scene.

Wallace Stevens