Quotes from Wallace Stevens

Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

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

The palm at the end of the mind,Beyond the last thought, rises…A gold-feathered birdSings in the palm.

Booming and booming of the new-come bee.

There it was, word for word,The poem that took the place of a mountain.

I placed a jar in Tennessee,And round it was, upon a hill.It made the slovenly wildernessSurround that hill.

Torn by dreams,By the terrible incantations of defeatsAnd by the fear that defeats and dreamsare one.The whole race is a poet that writes downThe eccentric propositions of its fate.

Light the first light of evening, as in a roomIn which we rest and, for small reason, thinkThe world imagined is the ultimate good.

And as he came he saw that it was spring,A time abhorrent to the nihilistOr searcher for the fecund minimum.

Twenty men crossing a bridge,Into a village,Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,Into twenty villages,Or one manCrossing a single bridge into a village.

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

His self and the sun were oneAnd his poems, although makings of his self,Were no less makings of the sun.

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things.... It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause...

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

All poetry is experimental poetry.

The subject matter of poetry is not that "collection of solid, static objects extended in space" but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are.

Poetry is the subject of the poem.

Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

The imagination is man's power over nature.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

To be young is all there is in the world. 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.