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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
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Live
Last
Preservation
Self
Sound
Analysis
Something
Words
Helps
Lives
Pressure
Helping
Expression
Reality
Doubt
Seems
Imagination
Back
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Pressing

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Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken.
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the windy sky Cries out a literate despair.
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Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
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Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.
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To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.
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The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.
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The wind shifts like this: Like a human without illusions, Who still feels irrational things within her.
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We live in an old chaos of the sun.
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Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.
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Next to love is the desire for love.
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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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Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.
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Poetry is the scholar's art.
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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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How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
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Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.
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The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.
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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.
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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
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The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
Wallace Stevens