Wallace Stevens Quotes

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 people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.

in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.

These external regions, what do we fill them with Except reflections

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

The poem goes form the poet’s gibberish to The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.

Man is an eternal sophomore.

A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.

The imperfect is our paradise.

An unaffected man in a negative light Could not have borne his labor nor have died Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

One thing remaining, infallible, would be Enough.

Aún no habías nacido cuando los árboles eran cristal
ni has nacido ahora, en esta vigilia dentro de un sueño.

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

"Bantams in Pine-Woods"

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Damned universal cock, as if the sun
Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.

Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.
Your world is you. I am my world.

You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!
Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines,

Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,
And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.