“The imagination is one of the forces of nature.”
Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia
“The imagination is one of the forces of nature.”
Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia
"Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself"
Collected Poems (1954)
Letter (10 January 1936); as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens, (No. 339)
“Exile desire
For what is not. This is the barrenness
Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.”
"Credences of Summer"
Collected Poems (1954)
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Collected Poems (1954) "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"
“The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.”
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
“Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
“The soul, he said, is composed
Of the external world.”
"Anecdote of Men by the Thousand"
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
“Nothing had happened because nothing had changed.
Yet the General was rubbish in the end.”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
“Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.”
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" - Full text online http://boppin.com/poets/stevens.htm
"The Blackbird Is Flying, The Children Must Be Writing" Sam Swope http://www.samswope.org/work2.htm (an essay on the use of this poem as a teaching tool).
Harmonium (1923)
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)