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Quotes from Wallace Stevens

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
~ Wallace Stevens
...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.
~ Wallace Stevens
Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
~ Wallace Stevens
At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
~ Wallace Stevens
One must read poetry with one's nerves.
~ Wallace Stevens
Poetry is the scholar's art.
~ Wallace Stevens
All poetry is experimental poetry.
~ Wallace Stevens
Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world
~ Wallace Stevens
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
~ Wallace Stevens
Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.
~ Wallace Stevens
In poetry you must love the words the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
~ Wallace Stevens
Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
~ Wallace Stevens
We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
~ Wallace Stevens
It is the belief and not the god that counts.
~ Wallace Stevens
God is gracious to some very peculiar people.
~ Wallace Stevens
God and the imagination are one.
~ Wallace Stevens
Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.
~ Wallace Stevens
The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.
~ Wallace Stevens
After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.
~ Wallace Stevens
The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination.
~ Wallace Stevens
The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world.
~ Wallace Stevens
One's ignorance is one's chief asset.
~ Wallace Stevens
After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends.
~ Wallace Stevens
Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
~ Wallace Stevens