Wallace Stevens

“Divinity must live within herself:Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow;Grievings in loneliness, or unsubduedElations when the forest blooms; gustyEmotions on wet roads on autumn nights;All pleasures and all pains, rememberingThe boughs of summer and the winter branch.These are the measures destined for her soul.”

“It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.”

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

“Poetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.”

“A pear should come to the table popped with juice,Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On termsLike these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.”

“From oriole to crow, note the declineIn music. Crow is realist. But, then,Oriole, also, may be realist.”

“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.”

“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.”

“in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.”

“It is never the thing but the version of the thing.”

“I like Rhine wine, blue grapes, good cheese, endive and lots of books, etc., etc., etc., as much as I like supreme fiction.”

“A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman. ”

“The exceeding brightness of this early sunMakes me conceive how dark I have become.”

“Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.”

“Two things of opposite natures seem to dependOn on another, as Logos dependsOn Eros, day on night, the imaginedOn the real. This is the origin of change.Winter and spring, cold copulars, embraceAnd forth the particulars of rapture come.Music falls on the silence like a senseA passion that we feel, not understand.Morning and afternoon are clasped togetherAnd North and South are an intrinsic coupleAnd sun and rain a plural, like two loversThat walk away together as one in the greenest body.”

“THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATEIClear water in a brilliant bowl, Pink and white carnations. The lightIn the room more like a snowy air, Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snowAt the end of winter when afternoons return.Pink and white carnations - one desiresSo much more than that. The day itselfIs simplified: a bowl of white, Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,With nothing more than the carnations there.IISay even that this complete simplicityStripped one of all one's torments, concealedThe evilly compounded, vital IAnd 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.IIIThere would still remain the never-resting mind,So that one would want to escape, come backTo 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.”

“People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.”

“Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.”

“Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.”

“... 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 moveIn the movement of the colors of the mind.Confused illuminations and sonorities,So much ourselves, we cannot tell apartthe idea and bearer - being ofthe idea....”

“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.”

“The Poem That Took The Place Of A MountainThere 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.”

“One must read poetry with one's nerves.”

“There will never be an endTo this droning of the surf.”

“The poem must resist the intelligenceAlmost successfully.”

“We live in an old chaos of the sun.”

“It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.”

“Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking fromThe weight of primary noon ...”

“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.”

“Let be be finale of seem.The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.”

“I am what is around me.”

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

“The mind can never be satisfied.”

“Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.”

“I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.”

“Poetry is the scholar's art.”

“After the leaves have fallen, we returnTo a plain sense of things. It is as ifWe had come to an end of the imagination,Inanimate in an inert savoir.”

“Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.”

“I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill.”

“I do not know which to prefer,The beauty of inflectionsOr the beauty of innuendosThe blackbird whistlingOr just after.”

“The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”

“It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.”

“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”

“The Plot Against The GiantFirst GirlWhen this yokel comes maundering,Whetting his hacker,I shall run before him,Diffusing the civilest odorsOut of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.It will check him.Second GirlI shall run before him,Arching cloths besprinkled with colorsAs small as fish-eggs.The threadsWill abash him.Third GirlOh, la...le pauvre!I shall run before him,With a curious puffing.He will bend his ear then.I shall whisperHeavenly labials in a world of gutturals.It will undo him.”