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It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

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
Writer
Back
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Pressing
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Pressure
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Reality
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Imagination

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After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends.
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Revolution Is the affair of logical lunatics.
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If the hero is not a person, the emblem Of him, even if Xenophon, seems To stand taller than a person stands, has A wider brow, large and less human Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body Of a primitive.
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Man is an eternal sophomore.
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To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game the ideal is to suggest.
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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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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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Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
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It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.
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An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses.
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Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
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The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.
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The grackles sing avant the spring Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly. They sing right puissantly.
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I do not know which to prefer - The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.
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I was the world in which I walked.
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It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.
Wallace Stevens
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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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Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
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In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be.
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There's no such thing as life or if there is, It is faster than the weather, faster than Any character. It is more than any scene: Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.
Wallace Stevens