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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
Vitality
Cease
Loses
Imagination
Real
Adhere
Ceases

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The mind can never be satisfied.
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the windy sky Cries out a literate despair.
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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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Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through. Have liberty not as the air within a grave Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native, In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.
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To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.
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We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
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One must read poetry with one's nerves.
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The mind is smaller than the eye.
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Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.
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Unless we believe in the hero, what is there To believe? Incisive what, the fellow Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud.
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It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
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The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
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Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
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...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.
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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.
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Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
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The greatest poverty is not to live In a physical world, to feel that one's desire Is too difficult to tell from despair.
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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.
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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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