Quotes from Wallace Stevens

It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.

I like Rhine wine, blue grapes, good cheese, endive and lots of books, etc., etc., etc., as much as I like supreme fiction.

The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination. p. 919

The palm stands on the edge of space. The wind moves slowly in the branches. The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination.

I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Suppose these hours are composed of ourselves, So that they become an impalpable town, full of Impalpable bells, transparencies of sound. Sounding in transparent dwellings of the self, Impalpable habitations that seem to move In the movement of the colors of the mind. Confused illuminations and sonorities, So much ourselves, we cannot tell apart the idea and bearer - being of the idea....

the lion sleeps in the sun. its nose on its paws. it can kill a man.

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling. p.903

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.

From oriole to crow, note the decline In music. Crow is realist. But, then, Oriole, also, may be realist.

Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

Bantams in Pine-Woods" Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan Of tan with henna hackles, halt! Damned universal cock, as if the sun Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail. Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal. Your world is you. I am my world. You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat! Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines, Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs, And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.

The stars are putting on their glittering belts, They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash Like a great shadow's last embellishment

Poetry Is a Destructive Force" 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.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

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

Man is an eternal sophomore.

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

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

These are the ashes of fiery weather, Of nights full of the green stars from Ireland, Wet out of the sea, and luminously wet, Like beautiful and abandonded refugees.

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.