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Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.

Wallace Stevens

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Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Definitions
Throw
Dark
Away
Light

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
Wallace Stevens
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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
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The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
Wallace Stevens
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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.'
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Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens
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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace Stevens
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The thinker as reader reads what has been written. He wears the words he reads to look upon Within his being.
Wallace Stevens
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Of what is real I say, Is it the old, the roseate parent or The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else The spirit and all ensigns of the self?
Wallace Stevens
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How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
Wallace Stevens
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Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Wallace Stevens
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After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
Wallace Stevens
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If the hero is not a person, the emblem Of him, even if Xenophon, seems To stand taller than a person stands, has A wider brow, large and less human Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body Of a primitive.
Wallace Stevens
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All poetry is experimental poetry.
Wallace Stevens
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The heavy trees, The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust, The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.
Wallace Stevens
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The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
Wallace Stevens
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The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.
Wallace Stevens
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Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
Wallace Stevens
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Thought tends to collect in pools.
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.
Wallace Stevens
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Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.
Wallace Stevens