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How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?

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
Spirit
Ever
Human
Humans
Contend
Terrific
Survived
Literature

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.
Wallace Stevens
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God is in me or else is not at all.
Wallace Stevens
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One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
Wallace Stevens
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The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
Wallace Stevens
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Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.
Wallace Stevens
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The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.
Wallace Stevens
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All poetry is experimental poetry.
Wallace Stevens
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Man is an eternal sophomore.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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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
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Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
Wallace Stevens
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I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.
Wallace Stevens
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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
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A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
Wallace Stevens
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The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind.
Wallace Stevens
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I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.
Wallace Stevens
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The heavy trees, The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust, The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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I am one of you and being one of you is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary Angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again.
Wallace Stevens
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The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
Wallace Stevens