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The life of the city never lets you go, nor do you ever want it to.

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
Lets
City
Cities
Ever
Never
Life

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The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
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The point of vision and desire are the same.
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The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.
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Unless we believe in the hero, what is there To believe? Incisive what, the fellow Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud.
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Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal.
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Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
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Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.
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The reader became the book and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.
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Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
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The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.
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Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.
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Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.
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Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.
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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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That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say. That savage of fire, That seed, Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad.
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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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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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New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
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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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Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.
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