“The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.”

“A poem is a meteor.”

“The poem must resist the intelligenceAlmost successfully.”

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

“From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.”

“The Snow Man"One must have a mind of winterTo regard the frost and the boughsOf the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long timeTo behold the junipers shagged with ice,The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to thinkOf any misery in the sound of the wind,In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the landFull of the same windThat is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,And, nothing himself, beholdsNothing that is not there and the nothing that is.Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. (Vintage; Reissue edition February 19, 1990)”

“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.”