Wallace Stevens citations

Page 5

“I was myself the compass of that sea:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”

“Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.”

“It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.”

“Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;”

“I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.”

“Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.”

“I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.”

“I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.”

“Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.”

“They married well because the marriage-place
Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell.
They were love’s characters come face to face.”

“The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse
Suggested that, at the final funeral,
The music halted and the horse stood still.”

“Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction.”

“O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?”

“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…”

“Clothe me entire in the final filament,
So that I tremble with such love so known
And myself am precious for your perfecting.”

“God is in me or else is not at all (does not exist).”

“Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.”

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

“At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.”

“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.”

“Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are
Twenty men crossing a bridge
Into a village.”

“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.”

“There is a month, a year, there is a time
In which majesty is a mirror of the self:
I have not but I am and as I am, I am.”

“Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,
Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,
Eliciting the still sustaining pomps
Of speech which are like music so profound
They seem an exaltation without sound.”

“A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.”

“After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”

“There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain,
So many clappers going without bells,
That these bethous compose a heavenly gong. One voice repeating, one tireless chorister,
The phrases of a single phrase, ke-ke,
A single text, granite monotony”

“The poem, through candor, brings back a power again
That gives a candid kind to everything.”

“Red-in-red repetitions never going
Away, a little rusty, a little rouged,
A little roughened and ruder, a crownThe eye could not escape, a red renown
Blowing itself upon the tedious ear.”