Wallace Stevens - Poet Quotes

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The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

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
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
A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.

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

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
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
Let wise men piece the world together with wisdom
Or poets with holy magic.
Hey-di-ho.

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

Wallace Stevens
Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.

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

Wallace Stevens
Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.

Wallace Stevens
What makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it.

Wallace Stevens
His [the poet's] function is to make his imagination theirs [the people's] and he fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.

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

Wallace Stevens
So poisonous Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to
The truth itself, the first idea becomes
The hermit in a poet's metaphors, Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.

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
Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human
Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.

Wallace Stevens
The soldier is poor without the poet's lines, His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick,
Inevitably modulating, in the blood.
And war for war, each has its gallant kind. How simply the fictive hero becomes the real;
How gladly with proper words the solider dies,
If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.

Wallace Stevens
For the poet, the imagination is paramount, and... he dwells apart in his imagination, as the philosopher dwells in his reason, and as the priest dwells in his belief … The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.

Wallace Stevens