Quote

To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game the ideal is to suggest.

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
Game
Guessing
Name
Suggest
Names
Consists
Pleasure
Poem
Games
Ideal
Three
Object
Littles
Ideals
Fourths
Little
Objects
Deprive

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The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
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Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood.
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I was the world in which I walked.
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Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed.
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If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.
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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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The grackles sing avant the spring Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly. They sing right puissantly.
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Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
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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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It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
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Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods.
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It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.
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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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Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
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Anything is beautiful if you say it is.
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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 great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.
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The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
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