Quote

The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.

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
Make
Discover
Invent
Clam
Things
Faults
Reveal
Clams
Essential
Discovering
Accordions
Essentials
Fault
Accordion
Conscious
Plus
Invents
Imagination
Unconscious
Surrealism
Without
Observation
Previously
Play
Familiar
Observed

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.
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Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.
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To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.
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Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
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It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
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The mind is smaller than the eye.
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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.
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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.
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Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
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In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
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The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
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Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
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Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.
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Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament.
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After a lustre of the moon, we say We have not the need of any paradise, We have not the need of any seducing hymn.
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As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
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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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behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car.
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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.'
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How red the rose that is the soldier
Wallace Stevens