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The figures of the past go cloaked. They walk in mist and rain and snow And go, go slowly, but they go.
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
Rain
Figures
Walk
Walks
Past
Cloaked
Mist
Slowly
Snow
More quotes by Wallace Stevens
How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?
Wallace Stevens
This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out Of dirt . . . It is not possible for the moon To blot this with its dove-winged blendings.
Wallace Stevens
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
Wallace Stevens
At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
Wallace Stevens
Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass.
Wallace Stevens
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
Wallace Stevens
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
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.
Wallace Stevens
The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
Wallace Stevens
I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.
Wallace Stevens
The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
Wallace Stevens
Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.
Wallace Stevens
The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man's interior world?
Wallace Stevens
the windy sky Cries out a literate despair.
Wallace Stevens
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.
Wallace Stevens
Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.
Wallace Stevens
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.
Wallace Stevens
After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir.
Wallace Stevens
Day after day, throughout the winter, We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason In a world of wind and frost.
Wallace Stevens
Everything is complicated if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens
