Wallace Stevens Quotes (278 quotes, page 4)

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)

Angels , Reality

“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)

Love , Women , Men , World

“Behold
The approach of him whom none believes,
Whom all believe that all believe,
A pagan in a varnished car.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Cars

“The wind in which the dead leaves blow.
Here I inhale profounder strength
And as I am, I speak and move
And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Thinking , Dead

“Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and
To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is
An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.
But are these separate?”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Reality

“If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“First one beam, then another, then
A thousand are radiant in the sky.
Each is both star and orb; and day
Is the riches of their atmosphere.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Star

“Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals.”

Wallace Stevens book The Auroras of Autumn

"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
The Auroras of Autumn (1950)

Reality

“The death of one god is the death of all.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Death , God

“He tries by a peculiar speech to speak The peculiar potency of the general”

Wallace Stevens

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

“To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

Literature , Problem , Painting

“The President ordains the bee to be
Immortal. The President ordains.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Bee

“To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on
The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart
That is the common, the bravest fundament, This is a facile exercise”

Wallace Stevens

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

Men , Feeling , Exercises , Singing

“Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.”

Wallace Stevens

Letter to his future wife, Elsie Moll Kachel (23 April 1916) as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens, No. 202

Spring

“Without a name and nothing to be desired,
If only imagined but imagined well.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Imagination

“Yet it depends on yours. The two are one.
They are a plural, a right and left, a pair,
Two parallels that meet if only in”

Wallace Stevens

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

Dependency

“Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

Search

“Let’s see the very thing and nothing else.
Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight.
Burn everything not part of it to ash.
Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky
Without evasion by a single metaphor.
Look at it in its essential barrenness
And say this, this is the centre that I seek.”

Wallace Stevens

"Credences of Summer"
Collected Poems (1954)

Sun , Parting

“A few things for themselves,
Florida, venereal soil,
Disclose to the lover.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

O Florida, Venereal Soil"
Harmonium (1923)

Lovers

“The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window
Did not desire that feathery argentines
Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them”

Wallace Stevens

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

“Be content —
Expansions, diffusions — content to be
The unspotted imbecile revery,
The heraldic center of the world
Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins,
The amorist Adjective aflame…”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

World

“That scrawny cry — It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Knowledge , Reality , Sun , Parting

“If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.”

Wallace Stevens

Letter (10 January 1936); as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens, (No. 339)

People , Sex , Forgetting

“Exile desire
For what is not. This is the barrenness
Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.”

Wallace Stevens

"Credences of Summer"
Collected Poems (1954)

“We reason of these things with later reason
And we make of what we see, what we see clearly
And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Dependency

“This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing”

Wallace Stevens

Collected Poems (1954) "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"

Indifference

“The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

God , Art , Thinking

“The President has apples on the table
And barefoot servants round him, who adjust
The curtains to a metaphysical "t"”

Wallace Stevens

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

“My house has changed a little in the sun.
The fragrance of the magnolias come close,
False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Change , Sun , Housing , Falseness

“Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Music , Feeling , Understanding , Sense

“The soul, he said, is composed
Of the external world.”

Wallace Stevens

"Anecdote of Men by the Thousand"

World , Soul

“Struggling toward impassioned choirs,
Crying among the clouds, enraged
By gold antagonists in air —
I know my lazy, leaden twang
Is like the reason in a storm;
And yet it brings the storm to bear.
I twang it out and leave it there.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Cry

“Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look
Across the roofs as sigil and as ward
And in your centre mark them and are cowed...”

Wallace Stevens

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

“Death is the mother of beauty”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"Sunday Morning"
Harmonium (1923)

Death , Beauty

“It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

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

“The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets
Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves
Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“Nothing had happened because nothing had changed.
Yet the General was rubbish in the end.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Change

“Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" - Full text online http://boppin.com/poets/stevens.htm
"The Blackbird Is Flying, The Children Must Be Writing" Sam Swope http://www.samswope.org/work2.htm (an essay on the use of this poem as a teaching tool).
Harmonium (1923)

Mountain

“What is there in life except one's ideas.
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Is it ideas that I believe?”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Life , Idea

“The words they spoke were voices that she heard.
She looked at them and saw them as they were
And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.”

Wallace Stevens

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