Wallace Stevens Quotes

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.

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

A few things for themselves, Florida, venereal soil, Disclose to the lover.

The bees came booming as if they had never gone, As if hyacinths had never gone. We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant<p> Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy. This means<p>Night-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.

One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.

"The Plain Sense of Things"

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.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art... in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

These Are the music of meet resignation; these The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you To magnify, if in that drifting waste You are to be accompanied by more Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

So poisonous Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to The truth itself, the first idea becomes The hermit in a poet’s metaphors, Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.

What chieftain, walking by himself, crying Most miserable, most victorious, Does not see these separate figures one by one, And yet see only one, in his old coat, His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town, Looking for what was, where it used to be?

I am the angel of reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

I play. But this is what I think.