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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Littles
Ideals
Fourths
Little
Objects
Deprive
Game
Guessing
Name
Suggest
Names
Consists
Pleasure
Poem
Games
Ideal
Three
Object

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

Image
Words of the world are the life of the world.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails.
Wallace Stevens
Image
It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Unless we believe in the hero, what is there To believe? Incisive what, the fellow Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The night Makes everything grotesque. Is it because Night is the nature of man's interior world?
Wallace Stevens
Image
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.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die The broken cartwheel on the hill.
Wallace Stevens
Image
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.
Wallace Stevens
Image
We live in an old chaos of the sun.
Wallace Stevens
Image
It is never the thing but the version of the thing: The fragrance of the woman not her self, Her self in her manner not the solid block, The day in its color not perpending time, Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord, The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The wind, Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry, Came bluntly thundering, more terrible Than the revenge of music on bassoons.
Wallace Stevens
Image
As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
Wallace Stevens
Image
You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without menaing.
Wallace Stevens
Image
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
Image
The grackles sing avant the spring Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly. They sing right puissantly.
Wallace Stevens
Image
Poetry increases the feeling for reality.
Wallace Stevens
Image
The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
Wallace Stevens