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Wallace Stevens Quotes
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Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.

Some of his best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar", "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock", "The Emperor of Ice-Cream", "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Sunday Morning", "The Snow Man", and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird".

✵ 2. October 1879 – 2. August 1955
Wallace Stevens photo
Wallace Stevens: 278   quotes 6   likes

Wallace Stevens Quotes

“The imperfect is our paradise.”

Wallace Stevens

“The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”

Wallace Stevens

Source: Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

Truth

“I am what is around me.”

Wallace Stevens

“The mind can never be satisfied.”

Wallace Stevens

"The Well Dressed Man With a Beard"
Harmonium (1923)
Variant: It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
Source: The Collected Poems
Context: 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.

“For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"The Snow Man"
Harmonium (1923)
Context: p>One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.</p

“One must read poetry with one's nerves.”

Wallace Stevens
Reading

“Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.”

Wallace Stevens

“Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;”

Wallace Stevens

Source: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

Children

“I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

Source: Harmonium

Feeling

“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.”

Wallace Stevens

"Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"
Collected Poems (1954)
Variant: We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
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.

Light

“I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
Harmonium (1923)

“They married well because the marriage-place
Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell.
They were love’s characters come face to face.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Love , Marriage , Hell

“The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse
Suggested that, at the final funeral,
The music halted and the horse stood still.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Music , Horse

“Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction.”

Wallace Stevens

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

Truth , Way , Search , Reality

“Clothe me entire in the final filament,
So that I tremble with such love so known
And myself am precious for your perfecting.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Love , Perfection , Clothes

“God is in me or else is not at all (does not exist).”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

God

“Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one.”

Wallace Stevens

"Connoisseur of Chaos"
Parts of a World (1942)

“At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.”

Wallace Stevens

"Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself"
Collected Poems (1954)

Bird , Winter , Cry

“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

“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

“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

Solitude

“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)

Life

“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)

Lovers

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

Wallace Stevens

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

Singing , Personality

“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

Time

“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)

Life , Death , Lie , Fear

“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)

Life , God , Way , Idea