Quote

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.

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
Hard
Leaves
Stalking
Solitude
January
Winter
Firmly
Sky
Hollow
Gawky
Ground
Hops
Stalks
Deep
Ice
Scraping
Single
Emptiness
Syllable
Sound
Rooted
Syllables

More quotes by 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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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace Stevens
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A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
Wallace Stevens
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The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind.
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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Life is the elimination of what is dead.
Wallace Stevens
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The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
Wallace Stevens
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At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
Wallace Stevens
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The mind is the great poem of winter, the man, Who, to find what will suffice, Destroys romantic tenements Of rose and ice.
Wallace Stevens
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It is never the thing but the version of the thing.
Wallace Stevens
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Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.
Wallace Stevens
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One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
Wallace Stevens
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It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
Wallace Stevens
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Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
Wallace Stevens
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We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.
Wallace Stevens
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Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
Wallace Stevens
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The physical world is meaningless tonight And there is no other.
Wallace Stevens
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Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
Wallace Stevens