 |
Poetry
|
|
Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
-Wallace Stevens, Adagia
|
|
Reality
|
|
|
The genuine artist is never true to life. He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
-Wallace Stevens
|
|
|
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
-Wallace Stevens
|
|
Seasons
|
|
|
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
-Wallace Stevens
|
|
Sex
|
|
|
If sex were all, then every trembling hand
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
-Wallace Stevens
|
|
Snow
|
|
|
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
-Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
|
|
Style
|
|
|
Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
-Wallace Stevens
|
|
Sunshine
|
|
|
The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.
-Wallace Stevens
|
|
Thought
|
|
|
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
-Wallace Stevens
|
|
Tolerance
|
|
|
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
-Wallace Stevens
|
|
Triviality, Pettiness
|
|
|
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
-Wallace Stevens
|
|
Truth
|
|
|
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
-Wallace Stevens
|
|
Weakness
|
|
|
Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
-Wallace Stevens
|
|
Youth
|
|
|
To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) --but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.
-Wallace Stevens
|
Books by and about Wallace Stevens