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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

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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
Blue
Changed
Upon
Play
Things
Men
Replied
Guitar

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Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.
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I am what is around me.
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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.
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If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, The future might stop emerging out of the past, Out of what is full of us yet the search And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.
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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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behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.
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The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.
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Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails.
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The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.
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A languid janitor bears His lantern through colonnades And the architecture swoons.
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Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.
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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?
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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.
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It is never the thing but the version of the thing.
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The mind is smaller than the eye.
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The muddy rivers of spring Are snarling Under the muddy skies. The mind is muddy.
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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.
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The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
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For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
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Cold is our element and winter's air Brings voices as of lions coming down.
Wallace Stevens