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You know that the nucleus of a time is not The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins Nor stand there making orotund consolations. He shares the confusions of intelligence.

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
Expressed
Live
Poetry
Heroic
Mind
Growth
Poem
Time
Stand
Confusions
World
Share
Ruins
Consolations
Effort
Confusion
Nucleus
Making
Intelligence
Shares
Speak
Victory
Consolation
Doe
Poet

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
Wallace Stevens
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The mind is smaller than the eye.
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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The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
Wallace Stevens
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One must read poetry with one's nerves.
Wallace Stevens
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It may be that the ignorant man, alone, Has any chance to mate his life with life That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.
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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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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Imagination is the will of things. . . .
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.
Wallace Stevens
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The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
Wallace Stevens
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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.
Wallace Stevens
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The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book.
Wallace Stevens
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Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.
Wallace Stevens
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The sea Severs not only lands but also selves.
Wallace Stevens
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Anything is beautiful if you say it is.
Wallace Stevens
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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
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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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.
Wallace Stevens