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Art
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Opusculum paedagogicum
The pears are not viols,
Nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.
They are yellow forms
Composed of curves
Bulging toward the base.
They are touched red.
They are not flat surfaces
Having curved outlines.
They are round
Tapering toward the top.
In the way they are modelled
There are bits of blue.
A hard dry leaf hangs
From the stem.
The yellow glistens.
It glistens with various yellows,
Citrons, oranges and greens
Flowering over the skin.
The shadows of the pears
Are blobs on the green cloth.
The pears are not seen
As the observer wills.
-Wallace Stevens, Study of Two Pears
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Authors & Writing
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The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
-Wallace Stevens, Adagia
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Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.
-Wallace Stevens
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Books
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How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
-Wallace Stevens
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As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
-Wallace Stevens
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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
-Wallace Stevens
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Civilization
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Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
-Wallace Stevens
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Death
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Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.
-Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning (1923)
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Earth
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I thought how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes, barrens, wilds. It still dwarfs, terrifies, crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens, orchards and fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.
-Wallace Stevens, Letters
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Ego
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If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.
-Wallace Stevens
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Imagination
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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.
-Wallace Stevens
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The imagination is man's power over nature.
-Wallace Stevens
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Mankind, Man
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I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure.
-Wallace Stevens
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Military, the
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How red the rose that is the soldier
-Wallace Stevens
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Modern, Modernism
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One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
-Wallace Stevens
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Music
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They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.
-Wallace Stevens
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Mystery
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It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
-Wallace Stevens
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Myths, Mythology
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All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.
-Wallace Stevens
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Perception
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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.
-Wallace Stevens
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Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
-Wallace Stevens
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Philosophy
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The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
-Wallace Stevens
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Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
-Wallace Stevens
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Photography
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Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
-Wallace Stevens
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Poetry
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The poet is the priest of the invisible.
-Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world.
-Wallace Stevens, Adagia
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Books by and about Wallace Stevens