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Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.
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
Rooms
Cloud
Walks
Consists
Four
Hills
Understanding
Clouds
Three
Surface
Things
Walk
World
Room
Beyond
More quotes by Wallace Stevens
Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.
Wallace Stevens
If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.
Wallace Stevens
Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.
Wallace Stevens
Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Wallace Stevens
Unless we believe in the hero, what is there To believe? Incisive what, the fellow Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud.
Wallace Stevens
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
Wallace Stevens
It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
Wallace Stevens
Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
Wallace Stevens
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
It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.
Wallace Stevens
Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.
Wallace Stevens
Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.
Wallace Stevens
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
in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
Wallace Stevens
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
Wallace Stevens
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Wallace Stevens
Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.
Wallace Stevens
And what's above is in the past As sure as all the angels are.
Wallace Stevens
Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
Wallace Stevens
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
