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Quotes from Transport to Summer — Wallace Stevens

1879–1955 United States

← All quotes by Wallace Stevens

6 quotes

The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.

Transport to Summer (1947)

The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair.

Transport to Summer (1947)

To get at the thing
Without gestures is to get at it as
Idea.

Transport to Summer (1947)

It was the last nostalgia: that he
Should understand.

Transport to Summer (1947)

Thus the theory of description matters most.
It is the theory of the word for those
For whom the word is the making of the world,
The buzzing world and lisping firmament.
It is a world of words to the end of it,
In which nothing solid is its solid self.

Transport to Summer (1947)

Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human
Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,
By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one.
The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.

Transport to Summer (1947)

Attribution

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