Wallace Stevens Quotes

Next to love is the desire for love.

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

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

It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect The final elegance, not to console Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.

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

The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance Are parts of apotheosis, appropriate And of its nature, the idiom thereof.

She walked upon the grass, Still quavering. The winds were like her maids, On timid feet, Fetching her woven scarves, Yet wavering.

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend On one another, as a man depends On a woman, day on night, the imagined On the real. This is the origin of change. Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace And forth the particulars of rapture come.

The major abstraction is the idea of man And major man is its exponent, abler In the abstract than in his singular, More fecund as principle than particle

After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.

We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark. Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.

This is old song That will not declare itself...

Each must the other take as sign, short sign To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements.

Poetry is the subject of the poem, From this the poem issues and To this returns. Between the two, Between issue and return, there is An absence in reality, Things as they are. Or so we say. But are these separate?

The monastic man is an artist.The philosopher Appoints man’s place in music, say, today. But the priest desires. The philosopher desires. And not to have is the beginning of desire. To have what is not is its ancient cycle.