Wallace Stevens: Quotes about life

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

“The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea”

Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Context: p>The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea... It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginningAnd sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end.</p

Life , Idea

“This may be a gross exaggeration of a very simple matter. But perhaps the same is true of many of the more prodigious things of life and death.”

Wallace Stevens

"The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet"
The Necessary Angel (1951)
Context: It may be dismissed, on the one hand, as a commonplace aesthetic satisfaction: and, on the other hand, if we say that the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called, even if poetry that involves us vitally, the feeling of deliverance, of a release, of a perfection touched, of a vocation so that all men may know the truth and that the truth may set them free — if we say these things and if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplished its purpose, would have seemed, whether young or old, whether in rags or ceremonial robe, a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation. This may be a gross exaggeration of a very simple matter. But perhaps the same is true of many of the more prodigious things of life and death.

Life , Death

“Life consists
Of propositions about life.”

Wallace Stevens

"Men Made Out of Words"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human
Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.

Life

“And that's life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Context: So that's life, then: things are they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.
A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing,
And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?
And that's life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.

Life

“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

“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

“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

“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

“The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art… in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it.”

Wallace Stevens

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

Life , Truth , Art , Imagination

“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

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

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

Life , Sense , Parting

“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

Life , Death , World , Evil

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

Wallace Stevens

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

Life