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The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

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
Loses
Ceases
Imagination
Unreal
May
Vitality
Ever
Maximum
Firsts
Cease
First
Effect
Adheres
Real
Extraordinary
Intensifies
Effects
Adhere

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It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
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Death is the mother of Beauty hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
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Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails.
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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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Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.
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The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
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Poetry is the scholar's art.
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The consolations of space are nameless things. It was after the neurosis of winter. It was In the genius of summer that they blew up The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds. It took all day to quieten the sky And then to refill its emptiness again.
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It is never the thing but the version of the thing: The fragrance of the woman not her self, Her self in her manner not the solid block, The day in its color not perpending time, Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord, The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.
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We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.
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Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
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The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
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Frogs eat Butterflies, Snakes eat Frogs, Hogs eat Snakes, Men eat Hogs.
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I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.
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The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
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I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.
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The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.
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The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.
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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.
Wallace Stevens