One cannot spend one’s time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
—Wallace Stevens
Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Poetry
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Photography
If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Aspirations
Intolerance respecting other people’s religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people’s art.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Tolerance
Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Death
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Perception
The genuine artist is never “true to life.” He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Reality
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
—Wallace Stevens
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Thought, Thoughts
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Snow
The bread of life is better than any souffle.
—Wallace Stevens
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Philosophers, Philosophy
Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn?. But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Weakness
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Poetry
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Walking, Truth, Self-Discovery
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
—Wallace Stevens
I can’t make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Man, Proverbs, Mankind
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Mystery
The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Authors & Writing
Successful careers are those that realize in the man the dreams of the child.
—Wallace Stevens
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Poetry
Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Poetry
It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
—Wallace Stevens
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Perception
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream
—Wallace Stevens
Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Style
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Seasons, Spring
The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.
—Wallace Stevens
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one’s meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Reality
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Stanley Kunitz American Poet
- Mark Van Doren American Poet, Critic
- Howard Nemerov American Poet, Novelist
- Conrad Aiken American Poet, Novelist
- Archibald MacLeish American Poet, Dramatist
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Theodore Roethke American Poet
- Robert Frost American Poet
- Marianne Moore American Poet
- Sylvia Plath American Poet, Novelist
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