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People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it.

Wallace Stevens

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Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
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More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
Wallace Stevens
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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
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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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The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Wallace Stevens
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Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.
Wallace Stevens
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Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.
Wallace Stevens
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A pear should come to the table popped with juice, Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.
Wallace Stevens
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The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father, Because, in chief, it, only, can defend Against itself. At its mercy, we depend Upon it.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.
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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Thought tends to collect in pools.
Wallace Stevens
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I was the world in which I walked.
Wallace Stevens
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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
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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
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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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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
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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
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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
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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