Quotes from Wallace Stevens

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker's rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Diaries are very futile. I must be all dream or all deed. It is quite impossible for me to express any of the beauty I feel to half the degree I feel it; and yet it is a great pleasure to seize an impression and lock it up in words: you feel as if you had it safe forever.

The magnificent cause of being— The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world— Leaves you With him for whom no phantasy moves, And you are pierced by a death.

The soul, he said, is composed Of the external world. 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.

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven.

Life contracts and death is expected, As in a season of autumn. The soldier falls. He does not become a three-days personage, Imposing his separation, Calling for pomp. Death is absolute and without memorial, As in a season of autumn, When the wind stops, When the wind stops and, over the heavens, The clouds go, nevertheless, In their direction.

THE DEATH OF A SOLDIER Life contracts and death is expected, As in a season of autumn. The soldier falls. He does not become a three-days personage, Imposing his separation, Calling for pomp. Death is absolute and without memorial, As in a season of autumn, When the wind stops, When the wind stops and, over the heavens, The clouds go, nevertheless, In their direction.

NEGATION Hi! The creator too is blind, Struggling toward his harmonious whole, Rejecting intermediate parts, Horrors and falsities and wrongs; Incapable master of all force, Too vague idealist, overwhelmed By an afflatus that persists. For this, then, we endure brief lives, The evanescent symmetries From that meticulous potter's thumb.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly." ? Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose

A poem should stimulate the sense of living and of being alive.

There would still remain the never-resting mind, So that one would want to escape, come back To what had been so long composed. The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

And for what, except for you, do I feel love? Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man Close to me, hidden in me day and night? In the uncertain light of single, certain truth, Equal in living changingness to the light In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest, For a moment in the central of our being, The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.

I am and have a being and play a part.

Let the place of the solitaires Be a place of perpetual undulation. Whether it be in mid-sea On the dark, green water-wheel, Or on the beaches, There must be no cessation Of motion, or of the noise of motion, The renewal of noise And manifold continuation; And, most, of the motion of thought And its restless iteration, In the place of the solitaires, Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation

The fire eye in the clouds survives the gods. To think of a dove with an eye of grenadine And the pines that are cornets, so it occurs, And a little island full of geese and stars: It may be that ignorant man, alone, Has any chance to mate his life with life That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.

Tuesday night. A delicate, blue night-most gorgeous, golden stars & the air as fresh and as pure as the air of the moon. I have a great affection for moonlight nights somehow & could cry "moon, moon, moon" as fast as the world calls "thief" after a villain. What a treasure house of silver and gold they are—& how lovely the planets look in the heavens—Bah—mere words.

From the opening lines of the play Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise All you need, To find poetry, Is to look for it with a lantern.

All history is modern history.

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

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

Not less because in purple I descended The western day, through what you called The loneliest air, not less was I myself

It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do wIth our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.