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Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.

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
Poetry
Desire
Art
Resemblance

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.
Wallace Stevens
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People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
Wallace Stevens
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Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
Wallace Stevens
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Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.
Wallace Stevens
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Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.
Wallace Stevens
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Life is the elimination of what is dead.
Wallace Stevens
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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
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One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
Wallace Stevens
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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.'
Wallace Stevens
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To lose sensibility, to see what one sees, As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift, To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone, As if the paradise of meaning ceased To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.
Wallace Stevens
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At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
Wallace Stevens
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The muddy rivers of spring Are snarling Under the muddy skies. The mind is muddy.
Wallace Stevens
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If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
Wallace Stevens
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Unless we believe in the hero, what is there To believe? Incisive what, the fellow Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud.
Wallace Stevens
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The imperfect is our paradise.
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world
Wallace Stevens
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The grackles sing avant the spring Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly. They sing right puissantly.
Wallace Stevens