Wallace Stevens: Trending quotes

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Wallace Stevens: 556 quotes6 likes

“Behold
The approach of him whom none believes,
Whom all believe that all believe,
A pagan in a varnished car.”

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“The wind in which the dead leaves blow.
Here I inhale profounder strength
And as I am, I speak and move
And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and
To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is
An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.
But are these separate?”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“First one beam, then another, then
A thousand are radiant in the sky.
Each is both star and orb; and day
Is the riches of their atmosphere.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

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

Wallace Stevens book The Auroras of Autumn

"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
The Auroras of Autumn (1950)

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

Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract

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

Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change

“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

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

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

Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change

“To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on
The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart
That is the common, the bravest fundament, This is a facile exercise”

Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure

“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

Letter to his future wife, Elsie Moll Kachel (23 April 1916) as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens, No. 202

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

Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract

“Yet it depends on yours. The two are one.
They are a plural, a right and left, a pair,
Two parallels that meet if only in”

Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure

“Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

“Let’s see the very thing and nothing else.
Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight.
Burn everything not part of it to ash.
Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky
Without evasion by a single metaphor.
Look at it in its essential barrenness
And say this, this is the centre that I seek.”

Wallace Stevens

"Credences of Summer"
Collected Poems (1954)

“Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.”

Wallace Stevens

"Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"
Collected Poems (1954)

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

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

O Florida, Venereal Soil"
Harmonium (1923)

“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

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

“The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window
Did not desire that feathery argentines
Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them”

Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure