Wallace Stevens Quotes

368 Sourced Quotes

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
Freedom is like a man who kills himself
Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife
Grows sharp in blood.

Wallace Stevens
There's no such thing as life; or if there is,
It is faster than the weather, faster than
Any character. It is more than any scene:
Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.

Wallace Stevens
Already the new-born children interpret love
In the voices of mothers.

Wallace Stevens
The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.

Wallace Stevens
The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.

Wallace Stevens
It may be that the ignorant man, alone,
Has any chance to mate his life with life
That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life
That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.

Wallace Stevens
I have said no
To everything, in order to get at myself.
I have wiped away moonlight like mud....

Wallace Stevens
The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world...

Wallace Stevens
The muddy rivers of spring
Are snarling
Under the muddy skies.
The mind is muddy.

Wallace Stevens
What is one man among so many men?
What are so many men in such a world?
Can one man think one thing and think it long?
Can one man be one thing and be it long?

Wallace Stevens
Poetry is a finikin thing of air
That lives uncertainly and not for long
Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

Wallace Stevens
The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.

Wallace Stevens
On a few words of what is real in the world
I nourish myself. I defend myself against
Whatever remains.

Wallace Stevens
The physical world is meaningless tonight
And there is no other.

Wallace Stevens
Day after day, throughout the winter,
We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason
In a world of wind and frost....

Wallace Stevens
The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.

Wallace Stevens