Wallace Stevens Quotations

Wallace Stevens was an American poet and businessman.

Sourced

One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
- Journal entry (20 June 1899); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 3.

A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.
- Journal entry (26 July 1899); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 3.

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
- Journal entry (4 March 1906); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 8

In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American — on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.
- Journal entry (9 April 1906); as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens

To be young is all there is in the world. The rest is nonsense — and cant. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it’s all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing.... Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.
- Letter to his future wife Elsie Moll Kachel (21 March 1907); as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 5

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
- Letter to his future wife Elsie Moll Kachel (16 May 1907); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 9

Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
- Letter to his future wife, Elsie Moll Kachel (23 April 1916) as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens, No. 202

The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.
- Journal entry (20 April 1920); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 6

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
- "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman" first published in The Dial No. 73 (July 1922)

We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began.
- "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman" (1922)

This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.
- "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman" (1922)

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
- Letter (19 December 1935) as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens, (No. 336)

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.
- Letter (10 January 1936); as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens, (No. 339)

One might have thought of sight, but who could think
Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
But the dark italics it could not propound.
And out of what sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live.
- Esthétique du Mal (1944)

I am the angel of reality,
Seen for a moment standing in the door.
- "Angel Surrounded by Paysans" (1949)

I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.
Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,
Like watery words awash; like meanings said
By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not,
Myself, only half a figure of a sort,
A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition appareled in
Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulders and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?
- "Angel Surrounded by Paysans" (1949)

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
- "Two or Three Ideas" (1951); later published in Opus Posthumous (1959)

Success as a result of industry is a peasant ideal.
- As quoted in "Ten Jack-Offs" in The Most Beautiful Woman in Town (1983) by Charles Bukowski

I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite.
- As quoted in Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (2002) by by Bart Eeckhout Ch. 12 "Poeticizing Epistemology", p. 268

Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words.
- As quoted in Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (2002) by by Bart Eeckhout Ch. 12 "Poeticizing Epistemology", p. 268

I placed a jar in Tennessee
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose upon it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
- "Anecdote of the Jar"

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
- "Anecdote of the Jar"

The soul, he said, is composed
Of the external world.
- "Anecdote of Men by the Thousand"

There are men of the East, he said,
who are the East.
There are men of a province
who are that province.
There are men of a valley
who are that valley.
- "Anecdote of Men by the Thousand"

The dress of a woman of Lhassa,
in its place
is an invisible element of that place
made visible.
- "Anecdote of Men by the Thousand"

Peter Quince at the Clavier (1915)

First published in the magazine Others (1915), later included in Harmonium (1923)

Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music.

In the green water, clear and warm,
Susanna lay.
She searched
The touch of springs,
And found
Concealed imaginings.
She sighed,
For so much melody.

Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.

She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.

A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned —
A cymbal crashed,
Amid roaring horns.

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.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden's choral.

Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death's ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

Harmonium (1923)

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
- "The Well Dressed Man with a Beard"

One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough.
- "The Well Dressed Man With a Beard"

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.
- "The Well Dressed Man With a Beard"

I heard them cry — the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?
- "Domination of Black"

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.
- "Domination of Black"

My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
Then beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.
- "Valley Candle"

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.
- "Metaphors of a Magnifico"

This is old song
That will not declare itself...
- "Metaphors of a Magnifico"

Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are
Twenty men crossing a bridge
Into a village.
- "Metaphors of a Magnifico"

The boots of the men clump
On the boards of the bridge.
The first white wall of the village
Rises through fruit-trees.
Of what was it I was thinking?
So the meaning escapes.
- "Metaphors of a Magnifico"

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
- "The Snow Man"

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
- "The Emperor of Ice Cream" - Commentary on this poem at Modern American Poetry (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
- "The Emperor of Ice Cream"

Death is the mother of beauty
- "Sunday Morning"

We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or an old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
- "Sunday Morning"

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

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.
That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
- "Gubbinal"

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
- "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" ~ {Full text online}
  - "The Blackbird Is Flying, The Children Must Be Writing" Sam Swope (an essay on the use of this poem as a teaching tool).

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
- "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
- "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
- "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
- "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
- "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"

A few things for themselves,
Florida, venereal soil,
Disclose to the lover.
- O Florida, Venereal Soil"

Donna, donna, dark,
Stooping in indigo gown
And cloudy constellations,
Conceal yourself or disclose
Fewest things to the lover —
A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit,
A pungent bloom against your shade.
- "O Florida, Venereal Soil"

Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,
Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,
Eliciting the still sustaining pomps
Of speech which are like music so profound
They seem an exaltation without sound.
- "On the Manner of Addressing Clouds"

These
Are the music of meet resignation; these
The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you
To magnify, if in that drifting waste
You are to be accompanied by more
Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.
- "On the Manner of Addressing Clouds"

Ideas of Order (1936)

She sang beyond the genius of the sea
- "The Idea of Order at Key West"

The sun, that brave man,
Comes through boughs that lie in wait,
That brave man.
Green and gloomy eyes
In dark forms of the grass
Run away.
The good stars,
Pale helms and spiky spurs,
Run away.
Fears of my bed,
Fears of life and fears of death,
Run away.
That brave man comes up
From below and walks without meditation,
That brave man.
- "The Brave Man"

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

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.

So that's life, then: things are they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.
A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing,
And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?
And that's life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.

Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,
Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,
Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.
The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows.

The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.

VII

It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
When shall I come to say of the sun,
It is a sea; it shares nothing;
The sun no longer shares our works
And the earth is alive with creeping men,
Mechanical beetles never quite warm?
And shall I then stand in the sun, as now
I stand in the moon, and call it good,
The immaculate, the merciful good,
Detached from us, from things as they are?
Not to be part of the sun? To stand
Remote and call it merciful?
The strings are cold on the blue guitar.

VIII

Struggling toward impassioned choirs,
Crying among the clouds, enraged
By gold antagonists in air —
I know my lazy, leaden twang
Is like the reason in a storm;
And yet it brings the storm to bear.
I twang it out and leave it there.

And the color, the overcast blue
Of the air, in which the blue guitar
Is a form, described but difficult,
And I am merely a shadow hunched
Above the arrowy, still string,
The maker of a thing yet to be made;
The color like a thought that grows
Out of a mood, the tragic robe
Of the actor, half his gesture, half
His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk
Sodden with his melancholy words,
The weather of his stage, himself.

Behold
The approach of him whom none believes,
Whom all believe that all believe,
A pagan in a varnished car.

Slowly the ivy on the stones
Becomes the stones. Women become
The cities, children become the fields
And men in waves become the sea.

The sea returns upon the men,
The fields entrap the children, brick
Is a weed and all the flies are caught,
Wingless and withered, but living alive.
The discord merely magnified.
Deeper within the belly's dark
Of time, time grows upon the rock.

XII

The blue guitar
And I are one.

I know that timid breathing. 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.

XIII

Be content --
Expansions, diffusions -- content to be
The unspotted imbecile revery,
The heraldic center of the world
Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins,
The amorist Adjective aflame...

XIV

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.

A candle is enough to light the world.
It makes it clear. Even at noon
It glistens in essential dark.
At night, it lights the fruit and wine,
The book and bread, things as they are...

Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead
At a table on which the food is cold?
Is my thought a memory, not alive?
Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?

XVI

Place honey on the altars and die,
You lovers that are bitter at heart.

XIX

That I may reduce the monster to
Myself, and then may be myself
In face of the monster, be more than part
Of it, more than the monstrous player of
One of its monstrous lutes, not be
Alone, but reduce the monster and be,
Two things, the two together as one,
And play of the monster and of myself,
Or better not of myself at all,
But of that as its intelligence,
Being the lion in the lute
Before the lion locked in stone.

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

XXI

A substitute for all the gods:
This self, not that gold self aloft,
Alone, one's shadow magnified,
Lord of the body, looking down,
As now and called most high,
The shadow of Chocorua
In an immenser heaven, aloft,
Alone, lord of the land and lord
Of the men that live in the land, high lord.
One's self and the mountains of one's land,
Without shadows, without magnificence,
The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone.

XXII

Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and
To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is
An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.
But are these separate?

XXIV

I play. But this is what I think.

XXVI

The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams
Of inaccessible Utopia.
A mountainous music always seemed
To be falling and to be passing away.

XXVII

It is the sea that whitens the roof.
The sea drifts through the winter air.
It is the sea that the north wind makes.
The sea is in the falling snow.
This gloom is the darkness of the sea.

XXVIII

I am a native in this world
And think in it as a native thinks

The wind in which the dead leaves blow.
Here I inhale profounder strength
And as I am, I speak and move
And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar.

XXIX

What is beyond the cathedral, outside,
Balances with nuptial song.
So it is to sit and to balance things
To and to and to the point of still,
To say of one mask it is like,
To say of another it is like,
To know that the balance does not quite rest,
That the mask is strange, however like.

XXXII

Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.
How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,
Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand
Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

XXXIII

Here is the bread of time to come,
Here is its actual stone. The bread
Will be our bread, the stone will be
Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except
The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)

It Must Be Abstract

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.
You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.
Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for that mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.

The death of one god is the death of all.

Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was
A name for something that never could be named.
There was a project for the sun and is.
There is a project for the sun. The sun
Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be
In the difficulty of what it is to be.

So poisonous
Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to
The truth itself, the first idea becomes
The hermit in a poet’s metaphors,
Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.

The monastic man is an artist.The philosopher
Appoints man’s place in music, say, today.
But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.
And not to have is the beginning of desire.
To have what is not is its ancient cycle.

III

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.

The poem, through candor, brings back a power again
That gives a candid kind to everything.

Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

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.

The clouds preceded us.
There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.
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 spire of blazoned days.

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.

Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips
Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.

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

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

Without a name and nothing to be desired,
If only imagined but imagined well.

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.

It must be visible or invisible,
Invisible or visible or both:
A seeing and unseeing in the eye.
The weather and the giant of the weather,
Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air:
An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought.

VII

Perhaps
The truth depends on a walk around a lake,
A composing as the body tires, a stop
To see hepatica, a stop to watch
A definition growing certain and
A wait within that certainty, a rest
In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.
Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence

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.

VIII

The first idea is an imagined thing.

Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
Incipit and a form to speak the word
And every latent double in the word,
Beau linguist.

He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase,
Or power of the wave, or deepened speech,
Or a leaner being, moving in on him,
Of greater aptitude and apprehension,
As if the waves at last were never broken,
As if the language suddenly, with ease,
Said things it had laboriously spoken.

The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance
Are parts of apotheosis, appropriate
And of its nature, the idiom thereof.

Apotheosis is not
The origin of the major man. He comes,
Compact in invincible foils, from reason,
Lighted at midnight by the studious eye,
Swaddled in revery, the object of
The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind...

My dame, sing for this person accurate songs.

He is and may be but oh! He is, he is,
This foundling of the infected past, so bright,
So moving in the manner of his hand.
Yet look not at his colored eyes. Give him
No names. Dismiss him from your images.
The hot of him is purest in the heart.

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

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

What chieftain, walking by himself, crying
Most miserable, most victorious,
Does not see these separate figures one by one,
And yet see only one, in his old coat,
His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town,
Looking for what was, where it used to be?

It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect
The final elegance, not to console
Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.

It Must Change

The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets
Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves
Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.

The bees came booming as if they had never gone,
As if hyacinths had never gone. We say
This changes and that changes. Thus the constant
Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths
Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause
In a universe of inconstancy. This means
Night-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph
Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.

The President ordains the bee to be
Immortal. The President ordains.

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

Should there be a question of returning or
Of death in memory’s dream? Is spring a sleep?
This warmth is for lovers at last accomplishing
Their love, this beginning, not resuming, this
Booming and booming of the new-come bee.

III

The right, uplifted foreleg of the horse
Suggested that, at the final funeral,
The music halted and the horse stood still.

Nothing had happened because nothing had changed.
Yet the General was rubbish in the end.

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.

Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.

In solitude the trumpets of solitude
Are not of another solitude resounding;
A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.

The partaker partakes of that which changes him.
The child that touches takes character from the thing,
The body, it touches. The captain and his men
Are one and the sailor and the sea are one.

On a blue island in a sky-wide water
The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,
Long after the planter’s death.

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.

Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade,
And you, and you, bethou me as you blow,
When in my coppice you behold me be.

There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain,
So many clappers going without bells,
That these bethous compose a heavenly gong.
One voice repeating, one tireless chorister,
The phrases of a single phrase, ke-ke,
A single text, granite monotony

Eye without lid, mind without any dream —
These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy,
Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale
Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a bird
Of stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you
And you, bethou him and bethou. It is
A sound like any other. It will end.

VII

Tonight the lilacs magnify
The easy passion, the ever-ready love
Of the lover that lies within us and we breathe
An odor evoking nothing, absolute.
We encounter in the dead middle of the night
The purple odor, the abundant bloom.

The fluctuations of certainty, the change
Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.

VIII

I am the spouse. She took her necklace off
And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am
The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt.
I am the spouse, divested of bright gold,
The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst,
Beyond the burning body that I bear.
I am the woman stripped more nakedly
Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible
Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.

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

A fictive covering
Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.

The poem goes form the poet’s gibberish to
The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.

Is there a poem that never reaches words
And one that chaffers the time away?
Is the poem both peculiar and general?
There’s a meditation there, in which there seems
To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or
Not apprehended well. Does the poet
Evade us, as in a senseless element?

He tries by a peculiar speech to speak
The peculiar potency of the general

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.

The casual is not Enough. The freshness of transformation is
The freshness of a world. It is our own,
It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves,
And that necessity and that presentation
Are rubbings of a glass in which we peer.

Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose
The suitable amours. Time will write them down.

It Must Give Pleasure

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

The difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that
Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall
Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason.

The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window
Did not desire that feathery argentines
Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds
Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them

It was enough for her that she remembered.

III

Red-in-red repetitions never going
Away,a little rusty, a little rouged,
A little roughened and ruder, a crown
The eye could not escape, a red renown
Blowing itself upon the tedious ear.

A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hell
And bad the sheep carouse. Or so they said.
Children in love with them brought early flowers
And scattered them about, no two alike.

We reason of these things with later reason
And we make of what we see, what we see clearly
And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.

This was their ceremonial hymn: Anon
We loved but would no marriage make. Anon
The one refused the other one to take,
Foreswore the sipping of the marriage wine.

Each must the other take as sign, short sign
To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements.

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.

The words they spoke were voices that she heard.
She looked at them and saw them as they were
And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.

The nothingness was a nakedness, a point,
Beyond which fact could not progress as fact.
Thereon the learning of the man conceived
Once more night’s pale illuminations, gold
Beneath, far underneath, the surface of
His eye and audible in the mountain of
His ear, the very material of his mind.

Straight to the utmost crown of night he flew.
The nothingness was a nakedness, a point
Beyond which thought could not progress as thought.
He had to choose. But it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choice
Between, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony.

VII

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

But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it,
To discover winter and know it well, to find
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,
It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real will from its crude compoundings come,
Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,
Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,
The fiction of an absolute — Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.

VIII

What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,
Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,
Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory,
Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and
On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,
Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,
Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,
Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

Is it he or is it I that experience this?

There is a month, a year, there is a time
In which majesty is a mirror of the self:
I have not but I am and as I am, I am.

These external regions, what do we fill them with
Except reflections

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

A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round
And round and round, the merely going round,
Until merely going round is a final good,
The way wine comes at a table in a wood.

Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.

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.

You remain the more than natural figure. You
Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational
Distortion, however fragrant, however dear.
That’s it: the more than rational distortion,
The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture
Pleased that the irrational is rational,
Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street,
I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.

Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.

The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines,
His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick,
Inevitably modulating, in the blood.
And war for war, each has its gallant kind.
How simply the fictive hero becomes the real;
How gladly with proper words the solider dies,
If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.

Parts of a World (1942)

That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.
It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.
Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.
He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own...
The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.
- "Poetry is a Destructive Force"

A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one.
- "Connoisseur of Chaos"

Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.
This arrival in the wild country of the soul,
All approaches gone, being completely there,
Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.
You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight
Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra
Hums and you say "The world in a verse,
A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,
Women invisible in music and motion and color,"
After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.
- "Arrival at the Waldorf"

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.
- "Men Made Out of Words"

If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,
Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost
Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.
He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;
As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.
It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.
It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.
If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness
A vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.
- "Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
- "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm"

The Auroras of Autumn (1950)

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.
- "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"

Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals.
- "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"

The Necessary Angel (1951)

The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination ISBN 0-394-70278-6

It may be dismissed, on the one hand, as a commonplace aesthetic satisfaction: and, on the other hand, if we say that the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called, even if poetry that involves us vitally, the feeling of deliverance, of a release, of a perfection touched, of a vocation so that all men may know the truth and that the truth may set them free — if we say these things and if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplished its purpose, would have seemed, whether young or old, whether in rags or ceremonial robe, a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation. This may be a gross exaggeration of a very simple matter. But perhaps the same is true of many of the more prodigious things of life and death.
- "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet"

Imagination as Value

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar's art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives — if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary . . . What light requires a day to do, and by day I mean a kind of Biblical revolution of time, the imagination does in the twinkling of an eye. It colors, increases, brings to a beginning and end, invents languages, crushes men, and, for that matter, gods in its hands, it says to women more than it is possible to say, it rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact...

For the poet, the imagination is paramount, and . . . he dwells apart in his imagination, as the philosopher dwells in his reason, and as the priest dwells in his belief ... The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things."

The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art... in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it.

What the poet has in mind . . . is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination. The poet tries to exemplify it, in part as I have tried to exemplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives.

The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.

The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination.

The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.

The paramount relation between poetry and painting today, between modern man and modern art, is simply this: that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince.

Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction.

Collected Poems (1954)

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
- "Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself"

That scrawny cry — It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
- "Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself"

One of the limits of reality
Presents itself in Oley when the hay,
Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is
A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.…
Things stop in that direction and since they stop
The direction stops and we accept what is
As good. The utmost must be good and is…
- "Credences of Summer"

Let’s see the very thing and nothing else.
Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight.
Burn everything not part of it to ash.
Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky
Without evasion by a single metaphor.
Look at it in its essential barrenness
And say this, this is the centre that I seek.
- "Credences of Summer"

Exile desire
For what is not. This is the barrenness
Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.
- "Credences of Summer"

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
- "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing
- "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"

We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
- "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"

Opus Posthumous (1955)

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.

To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing.

Adagia

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

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.

All history is modern history.

Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.

The imagination is one of the forces of nature.

To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as having something to say.

Man is an eternal sophomore.

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

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

God is in me or else is not at all (does not exist).

The world is a force not a presence.

Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.

Quotes about Stevens

Post-religious man, as Stevens saw him, still had a deep need for the kind of exaltation of the body and spirit which goes under different names in different religions — Christians call it grace, that is, the feeling or knowledge that the workings of God are revealed to the individual, thus lifting him or her up to a state of ecstatic consciousness. ... For the romantics in general such moments of ecstasis in the midst of nature are experienced by the solitary imagination, and the bonds of society are cast away as unimportant. Stevens once said that the romantic is a falsification, and perhaps the reason for the comment was his feeling that such moments of ecstatic relation in the midst of nature had to be given a social and eventually political meaning, rather than remaining in the arena of the spirit. Stevens poetry then offers a pastoral romantic ecstasis that become the occasions for searching out the relations between the individual, his or her community and the natural world.
- Justin Quinn in "Nature & Ideology in Wallace Stevens" (2000)

At the heart of many of Stevens's poems are harsh and unpalatable experiences revealed only gradually through his intense stylization.
- Helen Vendler, in The Columbia History of American Poetry (1993) edited by Jay Parini and Brett Candlish Millier

Stevens' way of informing us comes in language and imagery so radically different from previous times that it is difficult to recognize exactly what he means. But throughout his poetry he speaks, like the mystics, primarily of the nature of our relationship with the universe. He continually circles back to the idea that we actively participate in what the world looks like and what it means. Although cast in modern terms, this idea is profoundly spiritual and moral.
Since he gives no evidence of any direct visionary experience, it's not possible to say Stevens is a "mystic" or a "contemplative" poet. But he is a major figure in modern poetry because he synthesizes the concerns of the modern world — the emphasis on the human self as maker of meaning, the emphasis on scientific rationality, the emphasis on creating new forms to replace outmoded beliefs — with the perennial concerns of the human spirit. To find meaning, or the good — or by implication, God — we need to radically adjust our conception of reality. This takes powerful acts of individual imagination, and the possibilities are immense... Contrary to all appearances, to the difficulty of his verse, and to the preoccupied, distracted interpretations of contemporary critics, Wallace Stevens' poetry is a profoundly spiritual force. Anyone interested in the spiritual problems of modern humans must reckon with it.
- Dana Wilde "An Introduction to Reading Wallace Stevens as a Poet of the Human Spirit" in The Antigonish Review 109 (February 1999)