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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
Writer
Depends
Upon
Force
Father
Chief
Mind
Chiefs
World
Depend
Defend
Mercy

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Next to love is the desire for love.
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A violent order is disorder and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.
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One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
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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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Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too.
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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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On a few words of what is real in the world I nourish myself. I defend myself against Whatever remains.
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The imagination is man's power over nature.
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Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.
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The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.
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Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
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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.
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It is the belief and not the god that counts.
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Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.
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Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
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I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.
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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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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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Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.
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Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.
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