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

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Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.
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There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place.
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We live in an old chaos of the sun.
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Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
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After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends.
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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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I am what is around me.
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It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
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Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass.
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Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
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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.
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The mind is smaller than the eye.
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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.
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Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.
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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.
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Beauty is momentary in the mind -- The fitful tracing of a portal But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing.
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A pear should come to the table popped with juice, Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.
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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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