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The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.

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
Blackbirds
River
Flying
Rivers
Moving
Must
Blackbird

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Imagination is the will of things. . . .
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The point of vision and desire are the same.
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The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.
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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.
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Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
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You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without menaing.
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Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.
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It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.
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In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be.
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We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
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After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.
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The sea Severs not only lands but also selves.
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The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.
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How cold the vacancy When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist First sees reality. The mortal no Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.
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Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
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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.
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Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
Wallace Stevens
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The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
Wallace Stevens
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The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die The broken cartwheel on the hill.
Wallace Stevens
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We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy.
Wallace Stevens