Wallace Stevens: Trending quotes (page 4)

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Context: p>The clouds preceded us.There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.</p

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Context: So that's life, then: things are they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.
A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing,
And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?
And that's life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Context: Should there be a question of returning or
Of death in memory’s dream? Is spring a sleep?This warmth is for lovers at last accomplishing
Their love, this beginning, not resuming, this
Booming and booming of the new-come bee.

"Angel Surrounded by Paysans" (1949)
Context: I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.
Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,
Like watery words awash; like meanings said
By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not,
Myself, only half a figure of a sort,
A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition appareled in
Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulders and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

"Anecdote of the Jar"
Context: I placed a jar in Tennessee
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose upon it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.

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

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,
Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,
Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory, Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and
On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,
Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,
Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Context: The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar's art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives — if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary... What light requires a day to do, and by day I mean a kind of Biblical revolution of time, the imagination does in the twinkling of an eye. It colors, increases, brings to a beginning and end, invents languages, crushes men, and, for that matter, gods in its hands, it says to women more than it is possible to say, it rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact...

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Context: That I may reduce the monster to
Myself, and then may be myself
In face of the monster, be more than part
Of it, more than the monstrous player of
One of its monstrous lutes, not be
Alone, but reduce the monster and be,
Two things, the two together as one,
And play of the monster and of myself,
Or better not of myself at all,
But of that as its intelligence,
Being the lion in the lute
Before the lion locked in stone.

"The Well Dressed Man with a Beard"
Harmonium (1923)
Context: After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

"Credences of Summer"
Collected Poems (1954)
Context: One of the limits of reality
Presents itself in Oley when the hay,
Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is
A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.…
Things stop in that direction and since they stop
The direction stops and we accept what is
As good. The utmost must be good and is…

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,Beyond which fact could not progress as fact.
Thereon the learning of the man conceived
Once more night’s pale illuminations, goldBeneath, far underneath, the surface of
His eye and audible in the mountain of
His ear, the very material of his mind.</p

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Context: p>Is there a poem that never reaches words And one that chaffers the time away?
Is the poem both peculiar and general?
There’s a meditation there, in which there seemsTo be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or
Not apprehended well. Does the poet
Evade us, as in a senseless element?</p

"Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"
Collected Poems (1954)
Context: We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

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

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Context: The bees came booming as if they had never gone,
As if hyacinths had never gone. We say
This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths
Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause
In a universe of inconstancy. This meansNight-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph
Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: p>Straight to the utmost crown of night he flew.
The nothingness was a nakedness, a pointBeyond which thought could not progress as thought.
He had to choose. But it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choiceBetween, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony.</p

"Metaphors of a Magnifico"
Harmonium (1923)
Context: The boots of the men clump
On the boards of the bridge.
The first white wall of the village
Rises through fruit-trees.
Of what was it I was thinking?
So the meaning escapes.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Context: I am the spouse. She took her necklace off
And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am
The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt. I am the spouse, divested of bright gold,
The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst,
Beyond the burning body that I bear. I am the woman stripped more nakedly
Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible
Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.