Quote

They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

Wallace Stevens

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Changed
Upon
Play
Things
Men
Replied
Guitar
Blue

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

Image
The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.
Wallace Stevens
Image
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
Image
What's down below is in the past Like last night's crickets, far below.
Wallace Stevens
Image
A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.
Wallace Stevens
Image
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
Image
The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Wallace Stevens
Image
A violent order is disorder and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Man is an eternal sophomore.
Wallace Stevens
Image
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.
Wallace Stevens
Image
It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice
Wallace Stevens
Image
The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha, It held the shivering, the shaken limbs, Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The subject matter... is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes.
Wallace Stevens
Image
My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called standing people. . . .
Wallace Stevens
Image
A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.
Wallace Stevens
Image
What is there in life except one's ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Wallace Stevens
Image
It is the belief and not the god that counts.
Wallace Stevens
Image
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