One cannot spend one’s time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
—Wallace Stevens
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Summer
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
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
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
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
They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Music
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
—Wallace Stevens
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
—Wallace Stevens
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
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
Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol? It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
—Wallace Stevens
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Snow
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
The imagination is man’s power over nature.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Imagination
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Photography
Successful careers are those that realize in the man the dreams of the child.
—Wallace Stevens
It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
—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: Mankind, Proverbs, Man
Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Poetry
All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.
—Wallace Stevens
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Spring, Seasons
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Truth, Walking, 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
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Books, Literature
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Thought, Thoughts
The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Authors & Writing
Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
—Wallace Stevens
Topics: Philosophy, Philosophers
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
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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