Wallace Stevens: Trending quotes

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Wallace Stevens: 556 quotes6 likes

“A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned —
A cymbal crashed,
Amid roaring horns.”

Wallace Stevens

Peter Quince at the Clavier (1915)

“Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“All history is modern history.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

“Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death's ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.”

Wallace Stevens

Peter Quince at the Clavier (1915)

“The dress of a woman of Lhassa,
in its place
is an invisible element of that place
made visible.”

Wallace Stevens

"Anecdote of Men by the Thousand"

“Not to be realized because not to
Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because
Not to be realized.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"The Well Dressed Man With a Beard"
Harmonium (1923)

“A fictive covering
Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams
Of inaccessible Utopia.
A mountainous music always seemed
To be falling and to be passing away.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“On a blue island in a sky-wide water
The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,
Long after the planter’s death.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words.”

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

“She sang beyond the genius of the sea”

Wallace Stevens

"The Idea of Order at Key West"
Ideas of Order (1936)

“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.”

Wallace Stevens

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

“Is it he or is it I that experience this?”

Wallace Stevens

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

“Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house...
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.”

Wallace Stevens

Source: Parts of a World (1942) "The Well Dressed Man With a Beard"

“The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

“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 ghost

Or 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 coolness

A vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.”

Wallace Stevens

"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"
Transport to Summer (1947)

“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.”

Wallace Stevens

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