Wallace Stevens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It was enough for her that she remembered.”

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

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

“Let be be finale of seem.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,”

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

“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”

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

“Is it he or is it I that experience this?”

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

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

“I can Enjoying angels.”

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

“Perhaps, But he that of repetition is most master.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough.”

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

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

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

“Life consists The eccentric propositions of its fate.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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."”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.”

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

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

“All history is modern history.”

“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.”

“The imagination is one of the forces of nature.”

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

“Man is an eternal sophomore.”

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

“”

“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.”

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

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

“The world is a force not a presence.”

“Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.”

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

“Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.”

“A pear should come to the table popped with juice,”

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

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

“After the leaves have fallen, we return”

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

“Poetry is the scholar's art.”

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

“The exceeding brightness of this early sun”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Success as a result of industry is a peasant ideal.”

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

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

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

“It took dominion everywhere. Like nothing else in Tennessee.”

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

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

“The dress of a woman of Lhassa, made visible.”

“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.”

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

“Upon the bank, she stood Of old devotions.”

“The way through the world”

“She walked upon the grass, Yet wavering.”

“A breath upon her hand Amid roaring horns.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village.”

“The boots of the men clump So the meaning escapes.”

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

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

“Death is the mother of beauty”

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

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

“A man and a woman Are one.”

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

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

“I know noble accents In what I know.”

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

“A few things for themselves, Disclose to the lover.”

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

“These Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.”

“She sang beyond the genius of the sea”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The imagination is man's power over nature.”

“Behold A pagan in a varnished car.”

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

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

“The blue guitar And I are one.”

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

“Be content — The amorist Adjective aflame...”

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

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

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

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

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

“The poem must resist the intelligence”

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

“We live in an old chaos of the sun.”

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

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

“I play. But this is what I think.”

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

“Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.”

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

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

“I do not know which to prefer,”

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

“One must read poetry with one's nerves.”

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

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

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

“The death of one god is the death of all.”

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

“Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.”

“We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.”

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

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

“Not to be realized because not to Not to be realized.”

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

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

“The first idea is an imagined thing.”

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

“My dame, sing for this person accurate songs.”

“The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”

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

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

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

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

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

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