Quotes from Wallace Stevens

Her green mind made the world around her green.

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

It matters, because everything we say Of the past is description without place, a cast Of the imagination, made in sound; And because what we say of the future must portend, Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to be Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening.

The sky would be full of bodies like wood. There would have been cries of the dead And the living would be speaking, As a self that lives on itself.

The death of one god is the death of all.

A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.

He thought often of the land from which he came, How that whole country was a melon, pink If seen rightly and yet a possible red.

You like it under the trees in autumn, Because everything is half dead.

The soul, o ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind. A bronze rain from the sun descending marks The death of summer, which that time endures

We cannot look at the past or the future except by means of the imagination but again the imagination of backward glances is one thing and the imagination of looks ahead something else. Even the psychologists concede this present particular, for, with them, memory involves a reproductive power, and looks ahead involve a creative power: the power of our expectations.

The morality of the poet's radiant and productive atmosphere is the morality of the right sensation.

We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable.

All Things Imagined Are of Earth Compact… All things imagined are of earth compact, Strange beast and bird, strange creatures all; Strange minds of men, unwilling slaves to fact: Struggling with desperate clouds, they still proclaim The rushing pearl, the whirling black, Clearly, in well-remembered word and name. Even the dead, when they return, return Not as those dead, concealed away; But their old persons move again, and burn.

From From the Journal of Crispin There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not The oncoming fantasies of better birth.

I like a world in which the passing of the season (or the passing of the seasons) is a matter of some importance; and I have often wondered why newspapers did not contain wires from Italy reporting flights of storks; or from Buenos Aires reporting on the Argentine spring; and most of all I have wanted in winter daily dispatches on the front page of the Tribune describing the dazzle over the Florida Keys, and so on. However, today, General McArthur is more important than the sun.

The mere flowing of the water is a gaiety

The statement that the process does not involve the poet as subject, to the extent to which that is true, precludes direct egotism. On the other hand, without indirect egotism there can be no poetry. There can be no poetry without the personality of the poet, and that, quite simply, is why the definition of poetry has not been found and why, in short, there is none.

You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it.

Dwelling always in an in-between realm, between eras of the imagination, there exists a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagined are one. — Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, October 1, 1997)

Secret Man" The sounds of rain on the roof Are like the sound of doves. It is long since there have been doves On any house of mine. It is better for me In the rushes of autumn wind To embrace autumn, without turning To remember summer. Besides, the world is a tower. Its winds are blue. The rain falls at its base, Summers sink from it.

To be at the end of fact is not to be at the beginning of the imagination but it is to be at the end of both.

Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

One poem proves another and the whole, For the clairvoyant men that need no proof: The lover, the believer and the poet

It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow.