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

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Disillusion is the last illusion.
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Make the visible a little hard to see.
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Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.
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You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without menaing.
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The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind.
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Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.
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It is never the thing but the version of the thing.
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A change of style is a change of meaning.
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Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.
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Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.
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The poet is the priest of the invisible.
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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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Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through. Have liberty not as the air within a grave Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native, In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.
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The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.
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The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.
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The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
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This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out Of dirt . . . It is not possible for the moon To blot this with its dove-winged blendings.
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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.
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The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.
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