Wallace Stevens

The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse The music halted and the horse stood still.

— Wallace Stevens

Nothing had happened because nothing had changed. Yet the General was rubbish in the end.

— Wallace Stevens

Music falls on the silence like a sense, A passion that we feel, not understand.

— Wallace Stevens

In solitude the trumpets of solitude A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.

— Wallace Stevens

On a blue island in a sky-wide water Long after the planter’s death.

— Wallace Stevens

An unaffected man in a negative light Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.

— Wallace Stevens

Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade, When in my coppice you behold me be.

— Wallace Stevens

There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain, A single text, granite monotony

— Wallace Stevens

Eye without lid, mind without any dream — A sound like any other. It will end.

— Wallace Stevens

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.

— Wallace Stevens

The fluctuations of certainty, the change Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.

— Wallace Stevens

I am the spouse. She took her necklace off Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.

— Wallace Stevens

The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain

— Wallace Stevens

Clothe me entire in the final filament, And myself am precious for your perfecting.

— Wallace Stevens

A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.

— Wallace Stevens

The poem goes form the poet’s gibberish to The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.

— Wallace Stevens

He tries by a peculiar speech to speak The peculiar potency of the general

— Wallace Stevens

Like a page of music, like an upper air, A will to make iris frettings on the blank.

— Wallace Stevens

Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose The suitable amours. Time will write them down.

— Wallace Stevens

To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on This is a facile exercise

— Wallace Stevens

The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them

— Wallace Stevens

It was enough for her that she remembered.

— Wallace Stevens

Red-in-red repetitions never going Blowing itself upon the tedious ear.

— Wallace Stevens

A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hell And scattered them about, no two alike.

— Wallace Stevens

Let be be finale of seem.

— Wallace Stevens

We reason of these things with later reason And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.

— Wallace Stevens

This was their ceremonial hymn: Anon Foreswore the sipping of the marriage wine.

— Wallace Stevens

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.

— Wallace Stevens

Each must the other take as sign, short sign To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements.

— Wallace Stevens

They married well because the marriage-place They were love’s characters come face to face.

— Wallace Stevens

The words they spoke were voices that she heard. And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.

— Wallace Stevens

The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,

— Wallace Stevens

He imposes orders as he thinks of them, As the fox and snake do. It is a brave affair.

— Wallace Stevens

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

— Wallace Stevens

What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud, Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

— Wallace Stevens

Is it he or is it I that experience this?

— Wallace Stevens

There is a month, a year, there is a time I have not but I am and as I am, I am.

— Wallace Stevens

These external regions, what do we fill them with Except reflections

— Wallace Stevens

I can Enjoying angels.

— Wallace Stevens

A thing final in itself and, therefore, good: The way wine comes at a table in a wood.

— Wallace Stevens

Perhaps, But he that of repetition is most master.

— Wallace Stevens

Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, You are familiar yet an aberration.

— Wallace Stevens

You remain the more than natural figure. You The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.

— Wallace Stevens

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.

— Wallace Stevens

Soldier, there is a war between the mind Up down. It is a war that never ends.

— Wallace Stevens

Yet it depends on yours. The two are one. Two parallels that meet if only in

— Wallace Stevens

The meeting of their shadows or that meet But your war ends. And after it you return

— Wallace Stevens

With six meats and twelve wines or else without The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines.

— Wallace Stevens

His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick, If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.

— Wallace Stevens

After the final no there comes a yes No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

— Wallace Stevens

One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough.

— Wallace Stevens

Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed: It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

— Wallace Stevens

That's what misery is, It can kill a man.

— Wallace Stevens

A. A violent order is disorder; and Two things are one.

— Wallace Stevens

Life consists The eccentric propositions of its fate.

— Wallace Stevens

It is not in the premise that reality A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

— Wallace Stevens

Reality is the beginning not the end, Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals.

— Wallace Stevens

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

— Wallace Stevens

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

— Wallace Stevens

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.

— 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

The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art... in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it.

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

— Wallace Stevens

The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination.

— Wallace Stevens

The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.

— 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

Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction.

— Wallace Stevens

At the earliest ending of winter, In the early March wind.

— Wallace Stevens

That scrawny cry — It was A new knowledge of reality.

— 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

One of the limits of reality As good. The utmost must be good and is…

— Wallace Stevens

Let’s see the very thing and nothing else. And say this, this is the centre that I seek.

— Wallace Stevens

Exile desire Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.

— Wallace Stevens

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

— Wallace Stevens

Light the first light of evening, as in a room The world imagined is the ultimate good.

— Wallace Stevens

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. Out of all the indifferences, into one thing

— Wallace Stevens

We say God and the imagination are one... In which being there together is enough.

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing.

— Wallace Stevens

A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.

— Wallace Stevens

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

— Wallace Stevens

A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

All history is modern history.

— 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

The imagination is one of the forces of nature.

— Wallace Stevens

To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as having something to say.

— Wallace Stevens

Man is an eternal sophomore.

— Wallace Stevens

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

— 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

God is in me or else is not at all (does not exist).

— Wallace Stevens

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

— Wallace Stevens

The world is a force not a presence.

— Wallace Stevens

Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.

— Wallace Stevens

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

— Wallace Stevens

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

— Wallace Stevens

A pear should come to the table popped with juice,

— Wallace Stevens

After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

After the leaves have fallen, we return

— Wallace Stevens

A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order.

— Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the scholar's art.

— Wallace Stevens

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.

— Wallace Stevens

The exceeding brightness of this early sun

— Wallace Stevens

One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.

— Wallace Stevens

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!

— Wallace Stevens

In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American — on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.

— Wallace Stevens

To be young is all there is in the world. The rest is nonsense — and cant. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it’s all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing.... Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.

— Wallace Stevens

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

— Wallace Stevens

Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.

— Wallace Stevens

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.

— Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.

— Wallace Stevens

We agree in principle. That's clear. But take Madame, we are where we began.

— Wallace Stevens

This will make widows wince. But fictive things Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

— Wallace Stevens

Let wise men piece the world together with wisdom Hey-di-ho.

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

— Wallace Stevens

The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.

— Wallace Stevens

I am the angel of reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.

— 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

Success as a result of industry is a peasant ideal.

— Wallace Stevens

I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite.

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee And sprawled around, no longer wild.

— Wallace Stevens

It took dominion everywhere. Like nothing else in Tennessee.

— Wallace Stevens

The soul, he said, is composed Of the external world.

— Wallace Stevens

There are men of the East, he said, who are that valley.

— Wallace Stevens

The dress of a woman of Lhassa, made visible.

— Wallace Stevens

Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the self-same sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound; Is music.

— Wallace Stevens

In the green water, clear and warm, For so much melody.

— Wallace Stevens

Upon the bank, she stood Of old devotions.

— Wallace Stevens

The way through the world

— Wallace Stevens

She walked upon the grass, Yet wavering.

— Wallace Stevens

A breath upon her hand Amid roaring horns.

— Wallace Stevens

Beauty is momentary in the mind — Celebration of a maiden's choral.

— Wallace Stevens

Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

— Wallace Stevens

I heard them cry — the peacocks. Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

— Wallace Stevens

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.

— Wallace Stevens

I saw how the night came, And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

— Wallace Stevens

My candle burned alone in an immense valley. Until the wind blew.

— Wallace Stevens

Twenty men crossing a bridge, Crossing a single bridge into a village.

— Wallace Stevens

This is old song That will not declare itself...

— Wallace Stevens

Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village.

— Wallace Stevens

The boots of the men clump So the meaning escapes.

— Wallace Stevens

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

— Wallace Stevens

Take from the dresser of deal, The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

— Wallace Stevens

Death is the mother of beauty

— Wallace Stevens

What is divinity if it can comeOnly in silent shadows and in dreams?

— Wallace Stevens

Among twenty snowy mountains, Was the eye of the blackbird.

— Wallace Stevens

A man and a woman Are one.

— Wallace Stevens

I do not know which to prefer, Or just after.

— Wallace Stevens

O thin men of Haddam, Of the women about you?

— Wallace Stevens

I know noble accents In what I know.

— Wallace Stevens

It was evening all afternoon. In the cedar-limbs.

— Wallace Stevens

A few things for themselves, Disclose to the lover.

— Wallace Stevens

Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns, They seem an exaltation without sound.

— Wallace Stevens

These Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

— Wallace Stevens

She sang beyond the genius of the sea

— Wallace Stevens

The man bent over his guitar, Of things exactly as they are."

— Wallace Stevens

If to serenade almost to man Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

— Wallace Stevens

So that's life, then: things are they are? This buzzing of the blue guitar.

— Wallace Stevens

Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry, There are no shadows.

— Wallace Stevens

The thinking of art seems final when The thinking of god is smoky dew.

— Wallace Stevens

Struggling toward impassioned choirs, I twang it out and leave it there.

— Wallace Stevens

And the color, the overcast blue The weather of his stage, himself.

— Wallace Stevens

The imagination is man's power over nature.

— Wallace Stevens

Behold A pagan in a varnished car.

— Wallace Stevens

Slowly the ivy on the stones And men in waves become the sea.

— Wallace Stevens

The sea returns upon the men, Of time, time grows upon the rock.

— Wallace Stevens

The blue guitar And I are one.

— Wallace Stevens

I know that timid breathing. Where Must be. It could be nothing else.

— Wallace Stevens

Be content — The amorist Adjective aflame...

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

First one beam, then another, then Is the riches of their atmosphere.

— Wallace Stevens

A candle is enough to light the world. The book and bread, things as they are...

— Wallace Stevens

Place honey on the altars and die, You lovers that are bitter at heart.

— Wallace Stevens

That I may reduce the monster to Before the lion locked in stone.

— Wallace Stevens

The poem must resist the intelligence

— Wallace Stevens

What is there in life except one's ideas. Is it ideas that I believe?

— Wallace Stevens

We live in an old chaos of the sun.

— Wallace Stevens

A substitute for all the gods: The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone.

— Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the subject of the poem, But are these separate?

— Wallace Stevens

I play. But this is what I think.

— Wallace Stevens

The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams To be falling and to be passing away.

— Wallace Stevens

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

— Wallace Stevens

It is the sea that whitens the roof. This gloom is the darkness of the sea.

— Wallace Stevens

I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks

— Wallace Stevens

I do not know which to prefer,

— Wallace Stevens

The wind in which the dead leaves blow. And say they are on the blue guitar.

— Wallace Stevens

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

— Wallace Stevens

What is beyond the cathedral, outside, That the mask is strange, however like.

— Wallace Stevens

Throw away the lights, the definitions, When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

— Wallace Stevens

Here is the bread of time to come, The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

— Wallace Stevens

The death of one god is the death of all.

— Wallace Stevens

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

— Wallace Stevens

Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

— Wallace Stevens

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.

— Wallace Stevens

Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.

— Wallace Stevens

Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look And in your centre mark them and are cowed . . .

— Wallace Stevens

Not to be realized because not to Not to be realized.

— Wallace Stevens

Without a name and nothing to be desired, If only imagined but imagined well.

— Wallace Stevens

My house has changed a little in the sun. False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.

— Wallace Stevens

The first idea is an imagined thing.

— Wallace Stevens

The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance And of its nature, the idiom thereof.

— Wallace Stevens

My dame, sing for this person accurate songs.

— Wallace Stevens

The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

— Wallace Stevens

It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.

— Wallace Stevens

The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.

— Wallace Stevens

The bees came booming as if they had never gone, Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.

— Wallace Stevens

The President ordains the bee to be Immortal. The President ordains.

— Wallace Stevens

The President has apples on the table The curtains to a metaphysical "t"

— Wallace Stevens

Should there be a question of returning or Booming and booming of the new-come bee.

— Wallace Stevens