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The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father, Because, in chief, it, only, can defend Against itself. At its mercy, we depend Upon it.
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
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Father
Chief
Mind
Chiefs
World
Depend
Defend
Mercy
Depends
Upon
Force
More quotes by Wallace Stevens
Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.
Wallace Stevens
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
The word is the making of the world
Wallace Stevens
It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
Wallace Stevens
My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called standing people. . . .
Wallace Stevens
The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin.
Wallace Stevens
One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
Wallace Stevens
It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
Wallace Stevens
The grackles sing avant the spring Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly. They sing right puissantly.
Wallace Stevens
Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament.
Wallace Stevens
To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.
Wallace Stevens
What's down below is in the past Like last night's crickets, far below.
Wallace Stevens
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.
Wallace Stevens
Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.
Wallace Stevens
The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.
Wallace Stevens
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
Wallace Stevens
Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.
Wallace Stevens
Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.
Wallace Stevens
The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.
Wallace Stevens
One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
Wallace Stevens