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

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I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.
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Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.
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The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.
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Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament.
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Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.
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Of the Surface of Things In my room, the world is beyond my understanding But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.
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The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.
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Life is not free from its forms.
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It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.
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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.
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It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.
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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
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The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
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Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.
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Thought tends to collect in pools.
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It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
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The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.
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Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
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The mind is smaller than the eye.
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One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.
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