Wallace Stevens Quotes
Poet
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
Money is a kind of poetry.
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.
The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.
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.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
The point of vision and desire are the same.
To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.
The imagination is man's power over nature.
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.
One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
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.
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
One's ignorance is one's chief asset.
The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
The fire burns as the novel taught it how.