“We live in an old chaos of the sun.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Sigh for me, night-wind, in the noisy leaves of the oak. / I am tired. Sleep for me, heaven over the hill. / Shout for me, loudly and loudly, joyful sun, when you rise.”

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

“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)”