Wallace Stevens: Thing

Wallace Stevens was American poet. Explore interesting quotes on thing.

Wallace Stevens: 556 quotes6 likes

“Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and
To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is
An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.
But are these separate?”

Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“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)

“Let’s see the very thing and nothing else.
Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight.
Burn everything not part of it to ash.
Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky
Without evasion by a single metaphor.
Look at it in its essential barrenness
And say this, this is the centre that I seek.”

Wallace Stevens

"Credences of Summer"
Collected Poems (1954)

“A few things for themselves,
Florida, venereal soil,
Disclose to the lover.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

O Florida, Venereal Soil"
Harmonium (1923)

“Exile desire
For what is not. This is the barrenness
Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.”

Wallace Stevens

"Credences of Summer"
Collected Poems (1954)

“We reason of these things with later reason
And we make of what we see, what we see clearly
And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.”

Wallace Stevens

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure

“This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing”

Wallace Stevens

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

“Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" - Full text online http://boppin.com/poets/stevens.htm <br class="br"> "The Blackbird Is Flying, The Children Must Be Writing" Sam Swope http://www.samswope.org/work2.htm (an essay on the use of this poem as a teaching tool). <br class="br">Harmonium (1923)

“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)

“For the poet, the imagination is paramount, and... he dwells apart in his imagination, as the philosopher dwells in his reason, and as the priest dwells in his belief … The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.”

Wallace Stevens

The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value

“The first idea is an imagined thing.”

Wallace Stevens

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

“To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as having something to say.”

Wallace Stevens

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

“One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough.”

Wallace Stevens book Harmonium

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

“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

Source: Parts of a World (1942) "The Well Dressed Man With a Beard"

“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 ghost

Or 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 coolness

A vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.”

Wallace Stevens

"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"
Transport to Summer (1947)