Quote

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

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
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The heavy trees, The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust, The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths.
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A change of style is a change of meaning.
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Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
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It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.
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Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.
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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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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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We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
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It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.
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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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Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
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All poetry is experimental poetry.
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The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination.
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The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.
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The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book.
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the windy sky Cries out a literate despair.
Wallace Stevens
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The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
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.
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Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.
Wallace Stevens