Wallace Stevens Quotes

There are men of the East, he said, who are the East. There are men of a province who are that province. There are men of a valley who are that valley.

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.

In the green water, clear and warm, Susanna lay. She searched The touch of springs, And found Concealed imaginings. She sighed, For so much melody.

Esthétique du Mal (1944)

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

As a man and woman meet and love forthwith. Perhaps there are moments of awakening, Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which We more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep, As on an elevation, and behold The academies like structures in a mist.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as having something to say.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

A poem is a meteor.

It is never the thing but the version of the thing.

The first idea is an imagined thing.

I placed a jar in Tennessee And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose upon it, And sprawled around, no longer wild.

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

The Plot Against The Giant

First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.

Second Girl
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.

Third Girl
Oh, la...le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.