Wallace Stevens Quotes

This will make widows wince. But fictive things Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

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.

The poem, through candor, brings back a power again That gives a candid kind to everything.

In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American — on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.

If there must be a god in the house, must be, Saying things in the room and on the stair, Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor, Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly. He must be incapable of speaking, closed, As those are: as light, for all its motion, is; As color, even the closest to us, is; As shapes, though they portend us, are. It is the human that is the alien, The human that has no cousin in the moon. It is the human that demands his speech From beasts or from the incommunicable mass. If there must be a god in the house, let him be one That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness A vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass Of which we are too distantly a part.

The first idea is an imagined thing.

On a blue island in a sky-wide water The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear, Long after the planter’s death.

Let’s see the very thing and nothing else. Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight. Burn everything not part of it to ash. Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky Without evasion by a single metaphor. Look at it in its essential barrenness And say this, this is the centre that I seek.

Esthétique du Mal (1944)

We agree in principle. That's clear. But take The opposing law and make a peristyle, And from the peristyle project a masque Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness, Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, Is equally converted into palms, Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm, Madame, we are where we began.

Behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.

Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.

We reason of these things with later reason And we make of what we see, what we see clearly And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.

For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The paramount relation between poetry and painting today, between modern man and modern art, is simply this: that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince.