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

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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I was the world in which I walked.
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Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass.
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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.
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On a few words of what is real in the world I nourish myself. I defend myself against Whatever remains.
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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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The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.
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The figures of the past go cloaked. They walk in mist and rain and snow And go, go slowly, but they go.
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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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We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy.
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Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.
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It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most. It is older than the oldest speech of Rome. This is the tragic accent of the scene.
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The word is the making of the world
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Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill.
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It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
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Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
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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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Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world
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The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
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Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
Wallace Stevens
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We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Wallace Stevens