Wallace Stevens - Poetry Quotes

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Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

Wallace Stevens
There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel.

Wallace Stevens
The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.

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

Wallace Stevens
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

Wallace Stevens
Poetry is a finikin thing of air
That lives uncertainly and not for long
Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

Wallace Stevens
After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

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

Wallace Stevens
Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,
Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,
Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.
The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows.

Wallace Stevens
Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

Wallace Stevens
The subject matter of poetry is not that "collection of solid, static objects extended in space" but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are.

Wallace Stevens
Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.

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 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
If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

Wallace Stevens
Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.

Wallace Stevens
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

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
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.

Wallace Stevens