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Wallace Stevens on Anniversary

1879–1955 United States

← All quotes by Wallace Stevens

10 quotes

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.

Harmonium (1923)

I am the angel of reality,
Seen for a moment standing in the door.

The Auroras of Autumn (1950)

Not to be realized because not to
Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because
Not to be realized.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

We shall forget by day, except
The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Clothe me entire in the final filament,
So that I tremble with such love so known
And myself am precious for your perfecting.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.
Perhaps there are moments of awakening,
Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which
We more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep,
As on an elevation, and behold
The academies like structures in a mist.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

They married well because the marriage-place
Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell.
They were love’s characters come face to face.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

Where
Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentously declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea... It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

Like a page of music, like an upper air,
Like a momentary color, in which swans
Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences.
The west wind was the music, the motion, the force
To which the swans curveted, a will to change,
A will to make iris frettings on the blank.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

Attribution

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