Quote

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Wallace Stevens

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Priest
Priests
Invisible
Poet
Poetry

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

Image
Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
Wallace Stevens
Image
One must read poetry with one's nerves.
Wallace Stevens
Image
And what's above is in the past As sure as all the angels are.
Wallace Stevens
Image
It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Wallace Stevens
Image
A languid janitor bears His lantern through colonnades And the architecture swoons.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The reader became the book and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.
Wallace Stevens
Image
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.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.
Wallace Stevens
Image
It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
Wallace Stevens
Image
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.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Life is the elimination of what is dead.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Beauty is momentary in the mind -- The fitful tracing of a portal But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.
Wallace Stevens
Image
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.
Wallace Stevens