Wallace Stevens: Man

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

“An unaffected man in a negative light
Could not have borne his labor nor have died
Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Light

“Am I not,
Myself, only half a figure of a sort,
A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition appareled in
Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulders and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?”

Wallace Stevens

"Angel Surrounded by Paysans" (1949)
Context: I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.
Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,
Like watery words awash; like meanings said
By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not,
Myself, only half a figure of a sort,
A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition appareled in
Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulders and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

“The major abstraction is the idea of man
And major man is its exponent, abler
In the abstract than in his singular,
More fecund as principle than particle”

Wallace Stevens

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

Idea

“Apotheosis is not
The origin of the major man. He comes,

p>Compact in invincible foils, from reason,
Lighted at midnight by the studious eye,
Swaddled in revery, the object ofThe hum of thoughts evaded in the mind...”

Wallace Stevens

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

Light

“As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.
Perhaps there are moments of awakening,
Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which”

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

Love , Personality

“I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.
Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set”

Wallace Stevens

"Angel Surrounded by Paysans" (1949)
Context: I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.
Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,
Like watery words awash; like meanings said
By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not,
Myself, only half a figure of a sort,
A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition appareled in
Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulders and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

Angels

“Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined”

Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Context: p>Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imaginedOn the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.</p

Imagination , Nature , Dependency , Night

“A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

World

“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 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

“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

“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

“Man is an eternal sophomore.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

“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

Men , Age , Faith , Art

“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)

“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)

Change

“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

Music

“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)

“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)

Men