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The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.
Wallace Stevens
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Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
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More quotes by Wallace Stevens
The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination.
Wallace Stevens
To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.
Wallace Stevens
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.
Wallace Stevens
You know that the nucleus of a time is not The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins Nor stand there making orotund consolations. He shares the confusions of intelligence.
Wallace Stevens
Beauty is momentary in the mind -- The fitful tracing of a portal But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing.
Wallace Stevens
The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man's interior world?
Wallace Stevens
Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.
Wallace Stevens
Tinsel in February, tinsel in August. There are things in a man besides his reason.
Wallace Stevens
Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.
Wallace Stevens
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
On a few words of what is real in the world I nourish myself. I defend myself against Whatever remains.
Wallace Stevens
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
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
Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails.
Wallace Stevens
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Wallace Stevens
behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.
Wallace Stevens
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
What is there in life except one's ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Wallace Stevens
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
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.
Wallace Stevens
