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Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.

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
World
Vapid
Detail
Applied
Comparison
Details
Imagination
Whole

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One must read poetry with one's nerves.
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Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.
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Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
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Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world
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It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.
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Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.
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The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man's interior world?
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The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
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The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
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Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
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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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Poetry is the scholar's art.
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Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.
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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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An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.
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Imagination is the will of things. . . .
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I have said no To everything, in order to get at myself. I have wiped away moonlight like mud.
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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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The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world.
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I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.
Wallace Stevens