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

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The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
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It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
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If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
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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.'
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How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
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The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.
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The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world.
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Imagination is the will of things. . . .
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It is never the thing but the version of the thing: The fragrance of the woman not her self, Her self in her manner not the solid block, The day in its color not perpending time, Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord, The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.
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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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The imagination is man's power over nature.
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I am what is around me.
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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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Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails.
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For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
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In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
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Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
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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.
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What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
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The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
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