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Wallace Stevens Quotes

1879–1955 United States

Wallace Stevens (2 October 1879 – 2 August 1955) was an American modernist poet and businessman.

United States
Businesspeople
Lawyers
Poets

Also known as: Stevens, Wallace

Random Wallace Stevens quote

230 quotes

A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.

Opus Posthumous (1957)

What is there in life except one's ideas.
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Is it ideas that I believe?

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

Harmonium (1923)

Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals.

The Auroras of Autumn (1950)

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Harmonium (1923)

It was enough for her that she remembered.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.

Opus Posthumous (1957)

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Opus Posthumous (1957)

To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on
The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart
That is the common, the bravest fundament,
This is a facile exercise.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

Exile desire
For what is not. This is the barrenness
Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.

Collected Poems (1954)

He imposes orders as he thinks of them,
As the fox and snake do. It is a brave affair.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

The President has apples on the table
And barefoot servants round him, who adjust
The curtains to a metaphysical "t".

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look
Across the roofs as sigil and as ward
And in your centre mark them and are cowed.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

The Auroras of Autumn (1950)

My house has changed a little in the sun.
The fragrance of the magnolias come close,
False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

First one beam, then another, then
A thousand are radiant in the sky.
Each is both star and orb; and day
Is the riches of their atmosphere.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

In being more than an exception, part,
Though an heroic part, of the commonal.
The major abstraction is the commonal,
The inanimate, difficult visage.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

Ideas of Order (1936)

I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

Harmonium (1923)

Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night,
How is it I find you in difference, see you there
In a moving contour, a change not quite completed?
You are familiar yet an aberration.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Wallace Stevens (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.