Wallace Stevens Quotes

It must be visible or invisible, Invisible or visible or both: A seeing and unseeing in the eye. The weather and the giant of the weather, Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air: An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought.

My house has changed a little in the sun. The fragrance of the magnolias come close, False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.

Without a name and nothing to be desired, If only imagined but imagined well.

Not to be realized because not to Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because Not to be realized.

Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look Across the roofs as sigil and as ward And in your centre mark them and are cowed . . .

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

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.

The clouds preceded us. There was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete. From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

The first idea was not our own. Adam In Eden was the father of Descartes And eve made air the mirror of herself, Of her sons and of her daughters.

Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

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

The poem refreshes life so that we share, For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies Belief in an immaculate beginning And sends us, winged by an unconscious will, To an immaculate end.

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.

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.

Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was A name for something that never could be named. There was a project for the sun and is. There is a project for the sun. The sun Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be In the difficulty of what it is to be.