Quote

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.

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
Find
Measure
Right
Ears
Taller
Much
Sea
Crawl
Way
Shadow
Ants
Sun
Nevertheless
Reach
Dislike
Tree
Shore
Eye
Tall

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The thinker as reader reads what has been written. He wears the words he reads to look upon Within his being.
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A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
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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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How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
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Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
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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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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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A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.
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God is gracious to some very peculiar people.
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Disillusion is the last illusion.
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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.
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The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.
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