Wallace Stevens: Likeness

Wallace Stevens was American poet. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.
Wallace Stevens: 556   quotes 6   likes

“We more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep,
As on an elevation, and behold
The academies like structures in a mist.”

Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Context: p>As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.
Perhaps there are moments of awakening,
Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in whichWe more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep,
As on an elevation, and behold
The academies like structures in a mist.</p

Sleep

“To know that the balance does not quite rest,
That the mask is strange, however like.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Context: What is beyond the cathedral, outside,
Balances with nuptial song.
So it is to sit and to balance things
To and to and to the point of still,
To say of one mask it is like,
To say of another it is like,
To know that the balance does not quite rest,
That the mask is strange, however like.

“Bethou him, you
And you, bethou him and bethou. It is
A sound like any other. It will end.”

Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Context: Eye without lid, mind without any dream —These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy,
Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale
Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a birdOf stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you
And you, bethou him and bethou. It is
A sound like any other. It will end.

“The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.”

Wallace Stevens

"The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Books , World , Summer , Housing

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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"

Bird

“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

Sun

“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)

God , Knowledge , Time

“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

Beauty