Wallace Stevens Quotes

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.

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.

In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be.

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.

All poetry is experimental poetry.

Next to love is the desire for love.

It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

I am what is around me.

Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

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 glitter of 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, blowing in the same bare place for the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing herself, beholds nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.

For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.

Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without menaing.

...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.

I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.

We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

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

Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

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

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.