Wallace Stevens - Man Quotes

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Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.

Wallace Stevens
Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun. You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it. Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for that mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.

Wallace Stevens
If the hero is not a person, the emblem
Of him, even if Xenophon, seems
To stand taller than a person stands, has
A wider brow, large and less human
Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body
Of a primitive.

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

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

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
Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead
At a table on which the food is cold?
Is my thought a memory, not alive?
Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?

Wallace Stevens
If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

Wallace Stevens
The monastic man is an artist. The philosopher
Appoints man's place in music, say, today.
But the priest desires. The philosopher desires. And not to have is the beginning of desire.
To have what is not is its ancient cycle.

Wallace Stevens
Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words.

Wallace Stevens
Union of the weakest develops strength
Not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge
One of the leaves that have fallen in autumn?
But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.

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

Wallace Stevens
A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.

Wallace Stevens
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.

Wallace Stevens
The sun, that brave man,
Comes through boughs that lie in wait,
That brave man. Green and gloomy eyes
In dark forms of the grass
Run away. The good stars,
Pale helms and spiky spurs,
Run away. Fears of my bed,
Fears of life and fears of death,
Run away. That brave man comes up
From below and walks without meditation,
That brave man.

Wallace Stevens
Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.

Wallace Stevens
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

Wallace Stevens
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
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."
And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

Wallace Stevens
The paramount relation between poetry and painting today, between modern man and modern art, is simply this: that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince.

Wallace Stevens
The nothingness was a nakedness, a point, Beyond which fact could not progress as fact.
Thereon the learning of the man conceived
Once more night's pale illuminations, gold Beneath, far underneath, the surface of
His eye and audible in the mountain of
His ear, the very material of his mind.

Wallace Stevens
Apotheosis is not
The origin of the major man. He comes, Compact in invincible foils, from reason,
Lighted at midnight by the studious eye,
Swaddled in revery, the object of The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind...

Wallace Stevens
The number of ways of passing between the traditional two fixed points of man's life, that is to say, of passing from the self to God, is fixed only by the limitations of space, which is limitless. The eternal philosopher is the eternal pilgrim on that road. It is difficult to take him seriously when he relies on the evidence of the teeth, the throat and the bowels. Yet in the one poem that is unimpeachably divine, the poem of the ascent into heaven, it is possible to say that there can be no faults, since it is precisely the faults of life this poem enables us to leave behind. If the idea of God is the ultimate poetic idea, then the idea of the ascent into heaven is only a little below it.

Wallace Stevens
That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing. It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there. Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit. He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own... The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.

Wallace Stevens
The major abstraction is the idea of man
And major man is its exponent, abler
In the abstract than in his singular, More fecund as principle than particle

Wallace Stevens
The imagination is man's power over nature.

Wallace Stevens
Tinsel in February, tinsel in August.
There are things in a man besides his reason.

Wallace Stevens