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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

Damned universal cock, as if the sun
Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.

Harmonium (1923)

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

Collected Poems (1954)

An unaffected man in a negative light
Could not have borne his labor nor have died
Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

The major abstraction is the idea of man
And major man is its exponent, abler
In the abstract than in his singular,
More fecund as principle than particle.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

I can
Do all that angels can. I enjoy like them,
Like men besides, like men in light secluded,
Enjoying angels.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

The poet is a god, or, the young poet is a god. The old poet is a tramp.

Opus Posthumous (1957)

Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house...
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Parts of a World (1942)

She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.
"Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires.

Harmonium (1923)

A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one.

Parts of a World (1942)

We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns
That fall upon it out of the wind.

The Auroras of Autumn (1950)

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

Harmonium (1923)

And one trembles to be so understood and, at last,
To understand, as if to know became
The fatality of seeing things too well.

The Auroras of Autumn (1950)

It was the last nostalgia: that he
Should understand.

Transport to Summer (1947)

The first idea is an imagined thing.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

The essential gaudiness of poetry.

Harmonium (1923)

Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.

Harmonium (1923)

The first idea was not our own. Adam
In Eden was the father of Descartes
And eve made air the mirror of herself,
Of her sons and of her daughters.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

The President ordains the bee to be
Immortal.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
* * *
and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind.

Attribution

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