Wallace Stevens: Trending quotes

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Wallace Stevens: 556 quotes6 likes

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

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

“It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.”

Wallace Stevens

"Anecdote of the Jar"

“We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“The sea returns upon the men,
The fields entrap the children, brick
Is a weed and all the flies are caught,
Wingless and withered, but living alive.
The discord merely magnified.
Deeper within the belly's dark
Of time, time grows upon the rock.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

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

Wallace Stevens

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

“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.”

Wallace Stevens

Journal entry (20 June 1899); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 3

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

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"Metaphors of a Magnifico"
Harmonium (1923)

“A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hellAnd bad the sheep carouse. Or so they said.
Children in love with them brought early flowers
And scattered them about, no two alike.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“It was enough for her that she remembered.”

Wallace Stevens

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

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

Wallace Stevens

As quoted in "Ten Jack-Offs" in The Most Beautiful Woman in Town (1983) by Charles Bukowski

“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.”

Wallace Stevens

Journal entry (20 April 1920); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 6

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

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

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

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

“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.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955)

“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.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

“There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel.”

Wallace Stevens

The Necessary Angel (1951)

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

Wallace Stevens

Journal entry (4 March 1906); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 8

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

Wallace Stevens

As quoted in Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (2002) by by Bart Eeckhout Ch. 12 "Poeticizing Epistemology", p. 268

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

Wallace Stevens

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

“Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"Metaphors of a Magnifico"
Harmonium (1923)