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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 quotes6 likes

Wallace Stevens Quotes

“Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word,

Beau linguist.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“A substitute for all the gods:
This self, not that gold self aloft,
Alone, one's shadow magnified,
Lord of the body, looking down,
As now and called most high,
The shadow of Chocorua
In an immenser heaven, aloft,
Alone, lord of the land and lord
Of the men that live in the land, high lord.
One's self and the mountains of one's land,
Without shadows, without magnificence,
The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

“The meeting of their shadows or that meet
In a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay.
But your war ends. And after it you return”

Wallace Stevens

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

“Each must the other take as sign, short sign
To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“These external regions, what do we fill them with
Except reflections”

Wallace Stevens

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

“The monastic man is an artist.The philosopher
Appoints man’s place in music, say, today.
But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.

And not to have is the beginning of desire.
To have what is not is its ancient cycle.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

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

“The world is a force not a presence.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

“I play. But this is what I think.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“For the poet, the imagination is paramount, and... he dwells apart in his imagination, as the philosopher dwells in his reason, and as the priest dwells in his belief … The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.”

Wallace Stevens

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

“This was their ceremonial hymn: Anon
We loved but would no marriage make. Anon
The one refused the other one to take, Foreswore the sipping of the marriage wine.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“He imposes orders as he thinks of them,
As the fox and snake do. It is a brave affair.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“The first idea is an imagined thing.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance
Are parts of apotheosis, appropriate
And of its nature, the idiom thereof.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.”

Wallace Stevens

Peter Quince at the Clavier (1915)

“These
Are the music of meet resignation; these
The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you
To magnify, if in that drifting waste
You are to be accompanied by more
Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

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

“Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

“To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as having something to say.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

“It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.”

Wallace Stevens

"Anecdote of the Jar"

“We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“The sea returns upon the men,
The fields entrap the children, brick
Is a weed and all the flies are caught,
Wingless and withered, but living alive.
The discord merely magnified.
Deeper within the belly's dark
Of time, time grows upon the rock.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“The poem goes form the poet’s gibberish to
The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.”

Wallace Stevens

Journal entry (20 June 1899); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 3

“This is old song
That will not declare itself…”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"Metaphors of a Magnifico"
Harmonium (1923)

“A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hellAnd bad the sheep carouse. Or so they said.
Children in love with them brought early flowers
And scattered them about, no two alike.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“It was enough for her that she remembered.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“Success as a result of industry is a peasant ideal.”

Wallace Stevens

As quoted in "Ten Jack-Offs" in The Most Beautiful Woman in Town (1983) by Charles Bukowski

“The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.”

Wallace Stevens

Journal entry (20 April 1920); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 6

“I am a native in this world
And think in it as a native thinks”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“The poet is a god, or, the young poet is a god. The old poet is a tramp.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

“To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955)

“Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

“There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel.”

Wallace Stevens

The Necessary Angel (1951)

“Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!”

Wallace Stevens

Journal entry (4 March 1906); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 8

“I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite.”

Wallace Stevens

As quoted in Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (2002) by by Bart Eeckhout Ch. 12 "Poeticizing Epistemology", p. 268

“The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.”

Wallace Stevens

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

“Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"Metaphors of a Magnifico"
Harmonium (1923)

“A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned —
A cymbal crashed,
Amid roaring horns.”

Wallace Stevens

Peter Quince at the Clavier (1915)

“Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“All history is modern history.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

“Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death's ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.”

Wallace Stevens

Peter Quince at the Clavier (1915)

“The dress of a woman of Lhassa,
in its place
is an invisible element of that place
made visible.”

Wallace Stevens

"Anecdote of Men by the Thousand"

“Not to be realized because not to
Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because
Not to be realized.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"The Well Dressed Man With a Beard"
Harmonium (1923)

“A fictive covering
Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams
Of inaccessible Utopia.
A mountainous music always seemed
To be falling and to be passing away.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“On a blue island in a sky-wide water
The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,
Long after the planter’s death.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words.”

Wallace Stevens

As quoted in Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (2002) by by Bart Eeckhout Ch. 12 "Poeticizing Epistemology", p. 268