Works
Harmonium
Wallace StevensThe Auroras of Autumn
Wallace StevensFamous Wallace Stevens Quotes
“What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?”
"Sunday Morning"
Harmonium (1923)
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
“That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.”
"Gubbinal"
Harmonium (1923)
Context: p>That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.The world is ugly,
And the people are sad..</p
“I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.”
Source: The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
Wallace Stevens Quotes about the world
"The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
Wallace Stevens Quotes about imagination
"Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"
Collected Poems (1954)
Wallace Stevens: Trending quotes
“Perhaps
The truth depends on a walk around a lake”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Context: p>Perhaps
The truth depends on a walk around a lake,A composing as the body tires, a stop
To see hepatica, a stop to watch
A definition growing certain andA wait within that certainty, a rest
In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.
Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence</p
“Out of nothing to have come on major weather,”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: p>But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real will from its crude compoundings come,Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,
Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,The fiction of an absolute — Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.
“We live in an old chaos of the sun.”
"Sunday Morning"
Harmonium (1923)
Context: We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or an old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Context: We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or an old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
Wallace Stevens Quotes
"A High-Toned Old Christian Woman" first published in The Dial No. 73 (July 1922)
"Angel Surrounded by Paysans" (1949)
Context: I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.
Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,
Like watery words awash; like meanings said
By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not,
Myself, only half a figure of a sort,
A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition appareled in
Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulders and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?
“Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Context: p>Perhaps
The truth depends on a walk around a lake,A composing as the body tires, a stop
To see hepatica, a stop to watch
A definition growing certain andA wait within that certainty, a rest
In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.
Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence</p
“We agree in principle. That's clear.”
"A High-Toned Old Christian Woman" (1922)
Context: We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began.
“Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.”
"Two or Three Ideas" (1951); later published in Opus Posthumous (1959)
Context: 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.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Context: p>As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.
Perhaps there are moments of awakening,
Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in whichWe more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep,
As on an elevation, and behold
The academies like structures in a mist.</p
“If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness”
"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: p> If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghostOr Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolnessA vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.</p
“If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,”
"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: p> If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghostOr Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolnessA vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.</p
“Does not see these separate figures one by one,
And yet see only one”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Context: p>What chieftain, walking by himself, crying
Most miserable, most victorious,Does not see these separate figures one by one,
And yet see only one, in his old coat,
His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town,Looking for what was, where it used to be?</p
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
“I heard them cry — the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves”
"Domination of Black"
Harmonium (1923)
Context: I heard them cry — the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
"The Snow Man"
Harmonium (1923)
Context: p>One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.</p
“Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night.”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Context: p>Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for that mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.</p
“These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: p>The difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that
Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason.</p
“The casual is not Enough. The freshness of transformation is”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Context: p>The casual is not Enough. The freshness of transformation isThe freshness of a world. It is our own,
It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves,
And that necessity and that presentationAre rubbings of a glass in which we peer.</p
“The seraph
Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Context: The bees came booming as if they had never gone,
As if hyacinths had never gone. We say
This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths
Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause
In a universe of inconstancy. This meansNight-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph
Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.
"Valley Candle"
Harmonium (1923)
Context: My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
Then beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.
“It must be visible or invisible,
Invisible or visible or both:
A seeing and unseeing in the eye.”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Context: p>It must be visible or invisible,
Invisible or visible or both:
A seeing and unseeing in the eye.The weather and the giant of the weather,
Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air:
An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought.</p
“It is possible, possible, possible.”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: p>But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real will from its crude compoundings come,Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,
Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,The fiction of an absolute — Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Context: p>So poisonousAre the ravishments of truth, so fatal to
The truth itself, the first idea becomes
The hermit in a poet’s metaphors,Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.</p
“Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost”
"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: p> If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghostOr Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolnessA vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.</p
The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Context: The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar's art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives — if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary... What light requires a day to do, and by day I mean a kind of Biblical revolution of time, the imagination does in the twinkling of an eye. It colors, increases, brings to a beginning and end, invents languages, crushes men, and, for that matter, gods in its hands, it says to women more than it is possible to say, it rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact...
“Beyond which fact could not progress as fact.”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Variant: Beyond which thought could not progress as thought.
Context: The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,Beyond which fact could not progress as fact.
Thereon the learning of the man conceived
Once more night’s pale illuminations, goldBeneath, far underneath, the surface of
His eye and audible in the mountain of
His ear, the very material of his mind.</p
“What is beyond the cathedral, outside,
Balances with nuptial song.”
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Context: What is beyond the cathedral, outside,
Balances with nuptial song.
So it is to sit and to balance things
To and to and to the point of still,
To say of one mask it is like,
To say of another it is like,
To know that the balance does not quite rest,
That the mask is strange, however like.
“Let wise men piece the world together with wisdom
Or poets with holy magic.
Hey-di-ho.”
"Hieroglyphica" (1934)
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: p>Straight to the utmost crown of night he flew.
The nothingness was a nakedness, a pointBeyond which thought could not progress as thought.
He had to choose. But it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choiceBetween, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony.</p
“Here is the bread of time to come,
Here is its actual stone.”
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Context: Here is the bread of time to come,
Here is its actual stone. The bread
Will be our bread, the stone will be
Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except
The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.
“The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Context: p>The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea... It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginningAnd sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end.</p
The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Context: 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.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Context: p>He is and may be but oh! He is, he is,
This foundling of the infected past, so bright,
So moving in the manner of his hand. Yet look not at his colored eyes. Give him
No names. Dismiss him from your images.
The hot of him is purest in the heart. </p
"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
The Auroras of Autumn (1950)
“There are no shadows anywhere.
The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows.”
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Context: 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.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Context: I am the spouse. She took her necklace off
And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am
The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt. I am the spouse, divested of bright gold,
The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst,
Beyond the burning body that I bear. I am the woman stripped more nakedly
Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible
Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
“That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.”
"Poetry is a Destructive Force"
Parts of a World (1942)
Context: That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own...The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.
“The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.”
The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Context: 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.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Context: p>As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.
Perhaps there are moments of awakening,
Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in whichWe more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep,
As on an elevation, and behold
The academies like structures in a mist.</p
"The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet"
The Necessary Angel (1951)
Context: It may be dismissed, on the one hand, as a commonplace aesthetic satisfaction: and, on the other hand, if we say that the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called, even if poetry that involves us vitally, the feeling of deliverance, of a release, of a perfection touched, of a vocation so that all men may know the truth and that the truth may set them free — if we say these things and if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplished its purpose, would have seemed, whether young or old, whether in rags or ceremonial robe, a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation. This may be a gross exaggeration of a very simple matter. But perhaps the same is true of many of the more prodigious things of life and death.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: p>The difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that
Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason.</p
“It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.”
"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: p> If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghostOr Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolnessA vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.</p
“The major abstraction is the commonal,
The inanimate, difficult visage.”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Context: p>In being more than an exception, part,Though an heroic part, of the commonal.
The major abstraction is the commonal,
The inanimate, difficult visage.</p
“It is the sun that shares our works.”
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Context: It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
When shall I come to say of the sun,
It is a sea; it shares nothing;
The sun no longer shares our works
And the earth is alive with creeping men,
Mechanical beetles never quite warm?
And shall I then stand in the sun, as now
I stand in the moon, and call it good,
The immaculate, the merciful good,
Detached from us, from things as they are?
Not to be part of the sun? To stand
Remote and call it merciful?
The strings are cold on the blue guitar.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Context: p>Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was
A name for something that never could be named.
There was a project for the sun and is.There is a project for the sun. The sun
Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be
In the difficulty of what it is to be.</p
The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Context: 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.
“Life consists
Of propositions about life.”
"Men Made Out of Words"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human
Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.
