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The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.

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
Complete
Poetry
Purpose
Make
Life

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
Wallace Stevens
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The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world.
Wallace Stevens
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To lose sensibility, to see what one sees, As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift, To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone, As if the paradise of meaning ceased To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.
Wallace Stevens
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Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.
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One must read poetry with one's nerves.
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Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.
Wallace Stevens
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To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game the ideal is to suggest.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.
Wallace Stevens
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Of what is real I say, Is it the old, the roseate parent or The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else The spirit and all ensigns of the self?
Wallace Stevens
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Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
Wallace Stevens
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Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
Wallace Stevens
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Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
Wallace Stevens
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One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow
Wallace Stevens
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In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be.
Wallace Stevens
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Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / One on another, as Logos depends / On Eros, day on night, the imagined On the real. / This is the origin of change.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
Wallace Stevens