Wallace Stevens: Trending quotes (page 12)

“The words they spoke were voices that she heard.
She looked at them and saw them as they were
And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word,

Beau linguist.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Change

“A substitute for all the gods:
This self, not that gold self aloft,
Alone, one's shadow magnified,
Lord of the body, looking down,
As now and called most high,
The shadow of Chocorua
In an immenser heaven, aloft,
Alone, lord of the land and lord
Of the men that live in the land, high lord.
One's self and the mountains of one's land,
Without shadows, without magnificence,
The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Men , God , Mountain

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

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

Life , Sense , Parting

“The meeting of their shadows or that meet
In a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay.
But your war ends. And after it you return”

Wallace Stevens

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

War , Books

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

Wallace Stevens

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

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

Wallace Stevens

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

“The monastic man is an artist.The philosopher
Appoints man’s place in music, say, today.
But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.

And not to have is the beginning of desire.
To have what is not is its ancient cycle.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Music

“A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
Harmonium (1923)

“The world is a force not a presence.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

World

“I play. But this is what I think.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Thinking

“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 Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

Imagination

“This was their ceremonial hymn: Anon
We loved but would no marriage make. Anon
The one refused the other one to take, Foreswore the sipping of the marriage wine.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Love , Marriage , Wine

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

Wallace Stevens

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

Thinking

“The first idea is an imagined thing.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Imagination , Idea

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

Wallace Stevens

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

Nature , Parting

“Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.”

Wallace Stevens

Peter Quince at the Clavier (1915)

“These
Are the music of meet resignation; these
The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you
To magnify, if in that drifting waste
You are to be accompanied by more
Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"On the Manner of Addressing Clouds"
Harmonium (1923)

Music , Sun

“Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

Feeling , Failure