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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
Detail
Applied
Comparison
Details
Imagination
Whole
World
Vapid

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The point of vision and desire are the same.
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Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.
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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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Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
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Make the visible a little hard to see.
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Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
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Imagination...is the irrepressible revolutionist.
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Disillusion is the last illusion.
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All poetry is experimental poetry.
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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.
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A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
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If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
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Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
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Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
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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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Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill.
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One's ignorance is one's chief asset.
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It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
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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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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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