Wallace Stevens Quotes

368 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word, Beau linguist.

Wallace Stevens
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
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
We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.

Wallace Stevens
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
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
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
Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.

Wallace Stevens
It is the celestial ennui of apartments That sends us back to the first idea.

Wallace Stevens
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Wallace Stevens
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises…
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm.

Wallace Stevens
The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams
Of inaccessible Utopia.
A mountainous music always seemed
To be falling and to be passing away.

Wallace Stevens
That scrawny cry — It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

Wallace Stevens
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Wallace Stevens
It is the sea that whitens the roof.
The sea drifts through the winter air.
It is the sea that the north wind makes.
The sea is in the falling snow.
This gloom is the darkness of the sea.

Wallace Stevens
In solitude the trumpets of solitude
Are not of another solitude resounding;
A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.

Wallace Stevens
He tries by a peculiar speech to speak The peculiar potency of the general

Wallace Stevens
The poet is a god, or, the young poet is a god. The old poet is a tramp.

Wallace Stevens
But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather, It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real will from its crude compoundings come, Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,
Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one, The fiction of an absolute — Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.

Wallace Stevens
I heard them cry — the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Wallace Stevens
And, capable, created in his mind,
Eventual victor, out of the martyrs' bones The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.

Wallace Stevens
My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
Then beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.

Wallace Stevens
Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs.

Wallace Stevens
Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.

Wallace Stevens
The President ordains the bee to be
Immortal. The President ordains.

Wallace Stevens
What the poet has in mind... is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination. The poet tries to exemplify it, in part as I have tried to exemplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives.

Wallace Stevens
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

Wallace Stevens