Wallace Stevens: Trending quotes

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Wallace Stevens: 556 quotes6 likes

“In solitude the trumpets of solitude
Are not of another solitude resounding;
A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.”

Wallace Stevens

Letter (19 December 1935) as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens, (No. 336)

“Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips
Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“Donna, donna, dark,
Stooping in indigo gown
And cloudy constellations,
Conceal yourself or disclose
Fewest things to the lover —
A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit,
A pungent bloom against your shade.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"O Florida, Venereal Soil"
Harmonium (1923)

“My dame, sing for this person accurate songs.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose
The suitable amours. Time will write them down.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“The sun, that brave man,
Comes through boughs that lie in wait,
That brave man.

Green and gloomy eyes
In dark forms of the grass
Run away.

The good stars,
Pale helms and spiky spurs,
Run away.

Fears of my bed,
Fears of life and fears of death,
Run away.

That brave man comes up
From below and walks without meditation,
That brave man.”

Wallace Stevens

"The Brave Man"
Ideas of Order (1936)

“The number of ways of passing between the traditional two fixed points of man’s life, that is to say, of passing from the self to God, is fixed only by the limitations of space, which is limitless. The eternal philosopher is the eternal pilgrim on that road. It is difficult to take him seriously when he relies on the evidence of the teeth, the throat and the bowels. Yet in the one poem that is unimpeachably divine, the poem of the ascent into heaven, it is possible to say that there can be no faults, since it is precisely the faults of life this poem enables us to leave behind. If the idea of God is the ultimate poetic idea, then the idea of the ascent into heaven is only a little below it.”

Wallace Stevens

“A Collect of Philosophy”
Opus Posthumous (1955)

“The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.”

Wallace Stevens

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

“It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect
The final elegance, not to console
Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"Gubbinal"
Harmonium (1923)

“The fluctuations of certainty, the change
Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“Man is an eternal sophomore.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

“Place honey on the altars and die,
You lovers that are bitter at heart.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“You remain the more than natural figure. You
Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrationalDistortion, however fragrant, however dear.
That’s it: the more than rational distortion,
The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“The paramount relation between poetry and painting today, between modern man and modern art, is simply this: that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince.”

Wallace Stevens

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

“How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.”

Wallace Stevens

Letter to his future wife Elsie Moll Kachel (16 May 1907); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 9

“I know that timid breathing. Where
Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentously declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“I am the angel of reality,
Seen for a moment standing in the door.”

Wallace Stevens

"Angel Surrounded by Paysans" (1949)

“Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.
This arrival in the wild country of the soul,
All approaches gone, being completely there,
Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight
Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra
Hums and you say "The world in a verse,A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,
Women invisible in music and motion and color,"
After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.”

Wallace Stevens

"Arrival at the Waldorf"
Parts of a World (1942)