Wallace Stevens Quotes

368 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wallace Stevens
A languid janitor bears
His lantern through colonnades
And the architecture swoons.

Wallace Stevens
If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end,
The future might stop emerging out of the past,
Out of what is full of us; yet the search
And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.

Wallace Stevens
The winter is made and you have to bear it,
The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind,
For all the thoughts of summer that go with it
In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags....

Wallace Stevens
Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.

Wallace Stevens
One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls,
When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops.
He mocks the guinea, challenges
The crow, inciting various modes.
The sparrow requites one, without intent.

Wallace Stevens
To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.

Wallace Stevens
The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks
And far beyond the discords of the wind.

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
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
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
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 heavy trees,
The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust,
The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines
Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.

Wallace Stevens