Quote

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.

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
Space
Rounds
Crack
Freedom
Breathe
Outward
Hate
Spread
Cracks
Wells
Neither
Grave
Well
Air
Horizon
Love
Liberty
Graves
Dome
Break
Native
Domes
Within
Round
Horizons

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.
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Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
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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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The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
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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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I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.
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The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man's interior world?
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The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism Of machine within machine within machine.
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Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
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Poetry is a means of redemption.
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The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.
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The imperfect is our paradise.
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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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To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.
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I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
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Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice
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Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.
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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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All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.
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The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.
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