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

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.
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One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
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In a world of universal poverty The philosophers alone will be fat Against the autumn winds In an autumn that will be perpetual.
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...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door.
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The imagination is one of the forces of nature.
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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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If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.
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I am what is around me.
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The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.
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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 may be that the ignorant man, alone, Has any chance to mate his life with life That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.
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A change of style is a change of meaning.
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The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.
Wallace Stevens
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The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.
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Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights All pleasures and all pains, remembering The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.
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It was autumn and falling stars Covered the shrivelled forms Crouched in the moonlight.
Wallace Stevens
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The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
Wallace Stevens
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It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow.
Wallace Stevens
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It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
Wallace Stevens
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What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
Wallace Stevens