Wallace Stevens: Trending quotes (page 8)

“And the color, the overcast blue
Of the air, in which the blue guitar
Is a form, described but difficult,
And I am merely a shadow hunched
Above the arrowy, still string,
The maker of a thing yet to be made;
The color like a thought that grows
Out of a mood, the tragic robe
Of the actor, half his gesture, half
His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk
Sodden with his melancholy words,
The weather of his stage, himself.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Color , Mood , Weather

“Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are
Twenty men crossing a bridge
Into a village.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"Metaphors of a Magnifico"
Harmonium (1923)

Men

“He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase,

Or power of the wave, or deepened speech,
Or a leaner being, moving in on him,
Of greater aptitude and apprehension,

As if the waves at last were never broken,
As if the language suddenly, with ease,
Said things it had laboriously spoken.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“There is a month, a year, there is a time
In which majesty is a mirror of the self:
I have not but I am and as I am, I am.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Time

“Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,
Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,
Eliciting the still sustaining pomps
Of speech which are like music so profound
They seem an exaltation without sound.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

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

Music

“A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

“After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955)

Life , God

“There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain,
So many clappers going without bells,
That these bethous compose a heavenly gong. One voice repeating, one tireless chorister,
The phrases of a single phrase, ke-ke,
A single text, granite monotony”

Wallace Stevens

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

“The poem, through candor, brings back a power again
That gives a candid kind to everything.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“Red-in-red repetitions never going
Away, a little rusty, a little rouged,
A little roughened and ruder, a crownThe eye could not escape, a red renown
Blowing itself upon the tedious ear.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.”

Wallace Stevens

Journal entry (26 July 1899); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 3

Light

“In the green water, clear and warm,
Susanna lay.
She searched
The touch of springs,
And found
Concealed imaginings.
She sighed,
For so much melody.”

Wallace Stevens

Peter Quince at the Clavier (1915)

Imagination , Search , Spring , Water

“This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.”

Wallace Stevens

"A High-Toned Old Christian Woman" (1922)

“Slowly the ivy on the stones
Becomes the stones. Women become
The cities, children become the fields
And men in waves become the sea.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Women , Men , Children , Sea

“In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American — on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.”

Wallace Stevens

Journal entry (9 April 1906); as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens

Life , Way , Sense

“They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture
Pleased that the irrational is rational,Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street,
I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Feeling

“Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead
At a table on which the food is cold?
Is my thought a memory, not alive?
Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Food , Memory , Wine , Dead

“She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.”

Wallace Stevens

Peter Quince at the Clavier (1915)

Grass

“The blue guitar
And I are one.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“With six meats and twelve wines or else without
To walk another room…Monsieur and comrade,
The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Wine