Wallace Stevens - Poem 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
His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.

Wallace Stevens
You know that the nucleus of a time is not
The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind
Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed
As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins
Nor stand there making orotund consolations.
He shares the confusions of intelligence.

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 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
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
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
The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea... It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end.

Wallace Stevens
A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Wallace Stevens
Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and
To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is
An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.
But are these separate?

Wallace Stevens
The clouds preceded us. There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete. From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

Wallace Stevens
The poem goes form the poet's gibberish to
The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.

Wallace Stevens
The poem, through candor, brings back a power again
That gives a candid kind to everything.

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
There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

Wallace Stevens
Is there a poem that never reaches words And one that chaffers the time away?
Is the poem both peculiar and general?
There's a meditation there, in which there seems To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or
Not apprehended well. Does the poet
Evade us, as in a senseless element?

Wallace Stevens