The Best Wallace Stevens quotes

A poem is a meteor. — Wallace Stevens

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

The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully. — Wallace Stevens

It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem. — Wallace Stevens

The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written. — Wallace Stevens

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 reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so. — Wallace Stevens

To name an object is To deprive a poem of three–fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little–by–little guessing game; the ideal is To suggest. — Wallace Stevens

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

All poetry is experimental poetry. — Wallace Stevens

Unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere. — Wallace Stevens

Poetry is a means of redemption. — Wallace Stevens

Money is a kind of poetry. — Wallace Stevens

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied. — Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the scholar’s art. — Wallace Stevens

Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance. — Wallace Stevens

Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting. — Wallace Stevens

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

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

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

People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it. — Wallace Stevens

Poetry increases the feeling for reality. — 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

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

Life is the elimination of what is dead. — Wallace Stevens

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

The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to. — Wallace Stevens

There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it. — Wallace Stevens

The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself. — Wallace Stevens

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible. — Wallace Stevens

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

It may be that the ignorant man, alone, Has any chance to mate his life with life That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze. — Wallace Stevens

What is there in life except one’s ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life? — Wallace Stevens

Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails. — Wallace Stevens

Words of the world are the life of the world. — Wallace Stevens

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good. — Wallace Stevens

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. — Wallace Stevens

There’s no such thing as life; or if there is, It is faster than the weather, faster than Any character. It is more than any scene: Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging. — Wallace Stevens

Life is not free from its forms. — Wallace Stevens

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. — Wallace Stevens

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. — Wallace Stevens

Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble. — Wallace Stevens

The poet’s function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives. — Wallace Stevens

It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I’ve lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life. — Wallace Stevens

The subject matter… is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes. — Wallace Stevens

One cannot spend one’s time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be. — Wallace Stevens

There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place. — Wallace Stevens

Imagination is the will of things. . . . — Wallace Stevens

Imagination…is the irrepressible revolutionist. — Wallace Stevens

The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination. — Wallace Stevens

In the presence of extraordInary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagInation. — Wallace Stevens

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. — Wallace Stevens

The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos. — Wallace Stevens

You can’t depend on Your judgment when Your imagination is out of focus. — Wallace Stevens

Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail. — Wallace Stevens

The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world. — Wallace Stevens

The imagination is one of the forces of nature. — Wallace Stevens

We say God and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark. — Wallace Stevens

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. — Wallace Stevens

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature. — Wallace Stevens

The poet is The priest of The invisible. — Wallace Stevens

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

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

The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate. — Wallace Stevens

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

The poet makes silk dresses out of worms. — Wallace Stevens

The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. — Wallace Stevens

The summer night is like a perfection of thought. — Wallace Stevens

After a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door. — Wallace Stevens

We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in cold. — Wallace Stevens

Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood. — Wallace Stevens

The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man’s interior world? — Wallace Stevens

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / One on another, as Logos depends / On Eros, day on night, the imagined On the real. / This is the origin of change. — Wallace Stevens

Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration. — Wallace Stevens

In a world of universal poverty The philosophers alone will be fat Against the autumn winds In an autumn that will be perpetual. — Wallace Stevens

The wind shifts like this: Like a human without illusions, Who still feels irrational things within her. — Wallace Stevens

The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons. — Wallace Stevens

Day after day, throughout the winter, We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason In a world of wind and frost. — Wallace Stevens

Sigh for me, night–wind, in the noisy leaves of the oak. / I am tired. Sleep for me, heaven over the hill. / Shout for me, loudly and loudly, joyful sun, when you rise. — Wallace Stevens

The winter is made and you have to bear it, The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind, For all the thoughts of summer that go with it In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags. — Wallace Stevens

It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow. — Wallace Stevens

The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind. — Wallace Stevens

The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha, It held the shivering, the shaken limbs, Then bathed its body in the leaping lake. — Wallace Stevens

You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without menaing. — Wallace Stevens