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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.

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
Building
Union
Cities
Fallen
Wise
Snow
Wisdom
Unions
Avenges
Fall
Leaves
Avenge
Together
Weakness
Weakest
Men
City
Develops
Strength
Autumn

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Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
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If the hero is not a person, the emblem Of him, even if Xenophon, seems To stand taller than a person stands, has A wider brow, large and less human Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body Of a primitive.
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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.
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The mind is the great poem of winter, the man, Who, to find what will suffice, Destroys romantic tenements Of rose and ice.
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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.
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The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.
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If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
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The point of vision and desire are the same.
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A languid janitor bears His lantern through colonnades And the architecture swoons.
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The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
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The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
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I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.
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The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
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The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die The broken cartwheel on the hill.
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There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place.
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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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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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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.
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What's down below is in the past Like last night's crickets, far below.
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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.
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