Wallace Stevens: Quotes about the world

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Context: p>Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for that mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.</p

"Hieroglyphica" (1934)

"The Well Dressed Man with a Beard"
Harmonium (1923)
Context: After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

Letter to his future wife Elsie Moll Kachel (21 March 1907); as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 5
Context: To be young is all there is in the world. The rest is nonsense — and cant. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it’s all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing.... Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.

Esthétique du Mal (1944)
Context: One might have thought of sight, but who could think
Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
But the dark italics it could not propound.
And out of what sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live.

"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.

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

"Gubbinal"
Harmonium (1923)

"Arrival at the Waldorf"
Parts of a World (1942)

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

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

"Anecdote of Men by the Thousand"

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia