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How cold the vacancy When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist First sees reality. The mortal no Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.

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
Mortals
Vacancy
Tragic
Shaken
Sees
Negation
Cold
Phantoms
Gone
Realist
Reality
Realism
Firsts
Mortal
First
Emptiness

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The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.
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If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, The future might stop emerging out of the past, Out of what is full of us yet the search And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.
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I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.
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I was the world in which I walked.
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That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say. That savage of fire, That seed, Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad.
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The physical world is meaningless tonight And there is no other.
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After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
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Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
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Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
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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.
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Poetry is a means of redemption.
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Man is an eternal sophomore.
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If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
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The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
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Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.
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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.
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Life is not free from its forms.
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Thought tends to collect in pools.
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It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.
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There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place.
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