Wallace Stevens: Thing

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

“If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,”

Wallace Stevens

"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: p> If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghostOr Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolnessA vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.</p

God , Housing

“The partaker partakes of that which changes him.
The child that touches takes character from the thing,
The body, it touches. The captain and his men

Are one and the sailor and the sea are one.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Sea , Men , Change

“These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.”

Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: p>The difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that
Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason.</p

“Between, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony.”

Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: p>Straight to the utmost crown of night he flew.
The nothingness was a nakedness, a pointBeyond which thought could not progress as thought.
He had to choose. But it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choiceBetween, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony.</p

“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

“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

“The partaker partakes of that which changes him.
The child that touches takes character from the thing,
The body, it touches. The captain and his men

Are one and the sailor and the sea are one.”

Wallace Stevens

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

Change , Men , Sea

“A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good,”

Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round And round and round, the merely going round,
Until merely going round is a final good,
The way wine comes at a table in a wood.

“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

“To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or
Not apprehended well. Does the poet
Evade us, as in a senseless element?”

Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Context: p>Is there a poem that never reaches words And one that chaffers the time away?
Is the poem both peculiar and general?
There’s a meditation there, in which there seemsTo be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or
Not apprehended well. Does the poet
Evade us, as in a senseless element?</p

“Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house...
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

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

“A candle is enough to light the world.
It makes it clear. Even at noon
It glistens in essential dark.
At night, it lights the fruit and wine,
The book and bread, things as they are…”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Books , World , Light , Wine

“A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one.”

Wallace Stevens

"Connoisseur of Chaos"
Parts of a World (1942)

“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

“He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase,

Or power of the wave, or deepened speech,
Or a leaner being, moving in on him,
Of greater aptitude and apprehension,

As if the waves at last were never broken,
As if the language suddenly, with ease,
Said things it had laboriously spoken.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.”

Wallace Stevens

"A High-Toned Old Christian Woman" (1922)

“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

“Donna, donna, dark,
Stooping in indigo gown
And cloudy constellations,
Conceal yourself or disclose
Fewest things to the lover —
A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit,
A pungent bloom against your shade.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"O Florida, Venereal Soil"
Harmonium (1923)

Lovers

“I know that timid breathing. Where
Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentously declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“The wind in which the dead leaves blow.
Here I inhale profounder strength
And as I am, I speak and move
And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar.”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Thinking , Dead