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The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.
Wallace Stevens
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Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
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Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
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Great
Poems
Poem
Remains
Hell
Written
Heaven
Earth
More quotes by Wallace Stevens
I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
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
Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.
Wallace Stevens
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
The heavy trees, The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust, The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.
Wallace Stevens
The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.
Wallace Stevens
God is in me or else is not at all.
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
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
Wallace Stevens
Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.
Wallace Stevens
It is the belief and not the god that counts.
Wallace Stevens
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
Wallace Stevens
We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy.
Wallace Stevens
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
The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism Of machine within machine within machine.
Wallace Stevens
Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
Wallace Stevens
God and the imagination are one.
Wallace Stevens
I am one of you and being one of you is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary Angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again.
Wallace Stevens
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
Wallace Stevens
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.
Wallace Stevens
