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The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination.

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
Death
Satan
Tragedy
Imagination

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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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God is in me or else is not at all.
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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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Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / One on another, as Logos depends / On Eros, day on night, the imagined On the real. / This is the origin of change.
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Disillusion is the last illusion.
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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 placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.
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Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through. Have liberty not as the air within a grave Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native, In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.
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To lose sensibility, to see what one sees, As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift, To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone, As if the paradise of meaning ceased To be paradise, it is this to be destitute.
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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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I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
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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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Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
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Beauty is momentary in the mind -- The fitful tracing of a portal But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing.
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Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.
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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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Poetry is a means of redemption.
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Already the new-born children interpret love In the voices of mothers.
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Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
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The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book.
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