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Tinsel in February, tinsel in August. There are things in a man besides his reason.

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
Tinsel
February
August
Besides
Reason
Things
Men

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.
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You know that the nucleus of a time is not The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins Nor stand there making orotund consolations. He shares the confusions of intelligence.
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There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place.
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The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
Wallace Stevens
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There's no such thing as life or if there is, It is faster than the weather, faster than Any character. It is more than any scene: Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.
Wallace Stevens
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People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it.
Wallace Stevens
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The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
Wallace Stevens
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The reader became the book and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.
Wallace Stevens
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I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.
Wallace Stevens
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Money is a kind of poetry.
Wallace Stevens
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Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.
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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.
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Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
Wallace Stevens
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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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The wind shifts like this: Like a human without illusions, Who still feels irrational things within her.
Wallace Stevens
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The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
Wallace Stevens
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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
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The word is the making of the world
Wallace Stevens
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It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
Wallace Stevens
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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