Quote

Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting.

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
Ethics
Poetry
Painting
Part

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

Image
The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.
Wallace Stevens
Image
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.
Wallace Stevens
Image
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
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
God is in me or else is not at all.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The grackles sing avant the spring Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly. They sing right puissantly.
Wallace Stevens
Image
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
Wallace Stevens
Image
Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.
Wallace Stevens
Image
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
Image
New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
Wallace Stevens
Image
You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without menaing.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
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
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
Image
What is one man among so many men? What are so many men in such a world? Can one man think one thing and think it long? Can one man be one thing and be it long?
Wallace Stevens