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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

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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
Mind
Destroys
Men
Ice
Poem
Romantic
Winter
Rose
Find
Tenements
Great
Suffice

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What's down below is in the past Like last night's crickets, far below.
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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.
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The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
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Anything is beautiful if you say it is.
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The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.
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After a lustre of the moon, we say We have not the need of any paradise, We have not the need of any seducing hymn.
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Cold is our element and winter's air Brings voices as of lions coming down.
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True villains are extremely photogenic.
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I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.
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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.
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Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.
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The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.
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Disillusion is the last illusion.
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Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through. Have liberty not as the air within a grave Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native, In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.
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Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.
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Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.
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Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.
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I was the world in which I walked.
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I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
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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.
Wallace Stevens