Quote

I do not know which to prefer - The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

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
Music
Prefer
Noise
Hearing
Quiet
Inflections
Listening
Blackbird
Silence
Blackbirds
Beauty
Innuendo
Sound
Whistling

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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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God is gracious to some very peculiar people.
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Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
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The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
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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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Thought tends to collect in pools.
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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.
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Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.
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It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
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The grackles sing avant the spring Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly. They sing right puissantly.
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The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination.
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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.
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We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.
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Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.
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To lose sensibility, to see what one sees, As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift, To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone, As if the paradise of meaning ceased To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.
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Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
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The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world.
Wallace Stevens
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Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.
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Tinsel in February, tinsel in August. There are things in a man besides his reason.
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Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
Wallace Stevens