Quotes from Wallace Stevens

Money is a kind of poetry.

Complacencies of the peignoir, and lateCoffee and oranges in a sunny chair.

That scrawny cry—It wasA chorister whose c preceded the choir.It was part of the colossal sun.

He chose to include the thingsThat in each other are included, the whole,The complicate, the amassing harmony.

The poet is priest of the invisible.

A. A violent order is disorder; andB. A great disorder is an order. TheseTwo things are one.

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.

The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used. A free form does not assure freedom. As a form, it is just one more form. So that it comes to this, I suppose, that I believe in freedom regardless of form.

The essential gaudiness of poetry.

I am a native in this worldAnd think in it as a native thinks.

And one trembles to be so understood and, at last,To understand, as if to know becameThe fatality of seeing things too well.

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.The water never formed to mind or voice,Like a body wholly body, flutteringIts empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motionMade constant cry, caused constantly a cry,That was not ours although we understood,Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The book of moonlight is not written yet.

What makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it.

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.

Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!

Total grandeur of a total edifice,Chosen by an inquisitor of structuresFor himself. He stops upon this thresholdAs if the design of all his words takes formAnd frame from thinking and is realized.

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.

Just as my fingers on these keysMake music, so the self-same soundsOn my spirit make a music, too.

And still the grossest iridescence of oceanHowls hoo and rises and howls hoo and falls.

The world is a force, not a presence.

These external regions, what do we fill them withExcept reflections, the escapades of death,Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof.

Green crammers of the green fruits of the world.

And, capable, created in his mind,Eventual victor, out of the martyrs' bonesThe ultimate elegance: the imagined land.