quotes by Wallace Stevens

"I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos
The blackbird whistling
Or just after."
— Wallace Stevens

"The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream."
— Wallace Stevens (The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens)

"We live in an old chaos of the sun."
— Wallace Stevens

"After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir."
— Wallace Stevens (The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play)

"Poetry is an abstraction bloodied."
— Wallace Stevens

"Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake."
— Wallace Stevens

"The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly."
— Wallace Stevens (Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose)

"Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers."
— Wallace Stevens

"The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged

Where he could lie and gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home."
— Wallace Stevens

"I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it
was upon a hill."
— Wallace Stevens

"Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."
— Wallace Stevens (Harmonium)

"One must read poetry with one's nerves."
— Wallace Stevens

"It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom."
— Wallace Stevens

"Poetry is the scholar's art."
— Wallace Stevens

"There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf."
— Wallace Stevens

"The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully."
— Wallace Stevens

"Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark."
— Wallace Stevens

"THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATE

I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations - one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds."
— Wallace Stevens

""in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.""
— Wallace Stevens

"It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self."
— Wallace Stevens

"The mind can never be satisfied."
— Wallace Stevens

"The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become."
— Wallace Stevens (The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play)

"Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist."
— Wallace Stevens

"I am what is around me."
— Wallace Stevens

"A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order.
These two things are one."
— Wallace Stevens

"Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon ..."
— Wallace Stevens

"The Plot Against The Giant

First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.

Second Girl
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.

Third Girl
Oh, la...le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him."
— Wallace Stevens (Harmonium)

"The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things."
— Wallace Stevens

"... Suppose these hours are composed of ourselves,
So that they become an impalpable town, full of Impalpable bells, transparencies of sound.

Sounding in transparent dwellings of the self,
Impalpable habitations that seem to move
In the movement of the colors of the mind.

Confused illuminations and sonorities,
So much ourselves, we cannot tell apart
the idea and bearer - being of
the idea...."
— Wallace Stevens

"I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me."
— Wallace Stevens (The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination)