Wallace Stevens Quotes

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination.

... Suppose these hours are composed of ourselves,
So that they become an impalpable town, full of Impalpable bells, transparencies of sound.

Sounding in transparent dwellings of the self,
Impalpable habitations that seem to move
In the movement of the colors of the mind.

Confused illuminations and sonorities,
So much ourselves, we cannot tell apart
the idea and bearer - being of
the idea....

"They said"You have a blue guitar
You do not play things as they are".
The man replied,"things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar"."

The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination. p. 919

I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it
was upon a hill.

the lion sleeps in the sun.
its nose on its paws.
it can kill a man.

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 not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.

From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Poetry is a finikin thing of air
That lives uncertainly and not for long
Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.