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Wallace Stevens -
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
Wallace Stevens
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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
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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
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It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.
Wallace Stevens
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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
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Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.
Wallace Stevens
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As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.
Perhaps there are moments of awakening,
Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which We more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep,
As on an elevation, and behold
The academies like structures in a mist.
Wallace Stevens
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Quote of the day
The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Wallace Stevens
Born:
October 2, 1879
Died:
August 2, 1955
(aged 75)
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