Wallace Stevens cytaty

strona 4

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 whitch there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there. (ang.)
Źródło: The house was quiet and the world was calm w: Samuel French Morse, Poems by Wallace Stevens, Vintage Books, Nowy Jork 1959, s. 126, tłum. Stanisław Barańczak.

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven.
Źródło: A high-toned old christian woman w: Samuel French Morse, Poems by Wallace Stevens, Vintage Books, Nowy Jork 1959, s. 26.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Kontekst: Eye without lid, mind without any dream —These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy,
Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale
Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a birdOf stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you
And you, bethou him and bethou. It is
A sound like any other. It will end.

Esthétique du Mal (1944)
Kontekst: 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.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Kontekst: p>What chieftain, walking by himself, crying
Most miserable, most victorious,Does not see these separate figures one by one,
And yet see only one, in his old coat,
His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town,Looking for what was, where it used to be?</p

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Kontekst: p>But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real will from its crude compoundings come,Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,
Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,The fiction of an absolute — Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.

Peter Quince at the Clavier (1915)
Kontekst: Beauty is momentary in the mind —
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden's choral.

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

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

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

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Kontekst: Like a page of music, like an upper air,
Like a momentary color, in which swans
Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences. The west wind was the music, the motion, the force
To which the swans curveted, a will to change,
A will to make iris frettings on the blank.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
Harmonium (1923)

"The Emperor of Ice Cream"
Harmonium (1923)
Źródło: The Collected Poems
Kontekst: Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Kontekst: Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.
Kontekst: Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.
How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,
Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand
Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

Źródło: The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

Źródło: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

"Sunday Morning"
Harmonium (1923)
Kontekst: We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or an old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Kontekst: We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or an old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

"The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Kontekst: 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.

Źródło: Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

"The Well Dressed Man With a Beard"
Harmonium (1923)
Wariant: It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
Źródło: The Collected Poems
Kontekst: 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.

"The Snow Man"
Harmonium (1923)
Kontekst: p>One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.</p

Źródło: The Collected Poems