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The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

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
Loses
Imagination
Real
Adhere
Ceases
Vitality
Cease

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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.
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The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.
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Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass.
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I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
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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.
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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.
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God is gracious to some very peculiar people.
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It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.
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The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
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I have said no To everything, in order to get at myself. I have wiped away moonlight like mud.
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I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.
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New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
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At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
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The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.
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The point of vision and desire are the same.
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Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.
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Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
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What is one man among so many men? What are so many men in such a world? Can one man think one thing and think it long? Can one man be one thing and be it long?
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The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.
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To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game the ideal is to suggest.
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