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

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Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.
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After a lustre of the moon, we say We have not the need of any paradise, We have not the need of any seducing hymn.
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In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
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Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
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The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
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It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.
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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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Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.
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I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
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Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
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One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guinea, challenges The crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent.
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If the hero is not a person, the emblem Of him, even if Xenophon, seems To stand taller than a person stands, has A wider brow, large and less human Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body Of a primitive.
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It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
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The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
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It is time that beats in the breast and it is time That batters against the mind, silent and proud, The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.
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I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.
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God is gracious to some very peculiar people.
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Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
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Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.
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Make the visible a little hard to see.
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