Quote

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

Wallace Stevens

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Nerves
Poetry
Read
Must

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

Image
The point of vision and desire are the same.
Wallace Stevens
Image
We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Thought tends to collect in pools.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The winter is made and you have to bear it, The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind, For all the thoughts of summer that go with it In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / One on another, as Logos depends / On Eros, day on night, the imagined On the real. / This is the origin of change.
Wallace Stevens
Image
It is never the thing but the version of the thing: The fragrance of the woman not her self, Her self in her manner not the solid block, The day in its color not perpending time, Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord, The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.
Wallace Stevens
Image
To lose sensibility, to see what one sees, As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift, To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone, As if the paradise of meaning ceased To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The sea Severs not only lands but also selves.
Wallace Stevens
Image
It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The reader became the book and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.
Wallace Stevens
Image
All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.
Wallace Stevens
Image
It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism Of machine within machine within machine.
Wallace Stevens
Image
What's down below is in the past Like last night's crickets, far below.
Wallace Stevens
Image
You know that the nucleus of a time is not The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins Nor stand there making orotund consolations. He shares the confusions of intelligence.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Next to love is the desire for love.
Wallace Stevens