Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Wallace Stevens, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Wallace Stevens quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 296 Wallace Stevens quotes for you to read and share.

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Already the new-born children interpret love
In the voices of mothers. -- Wallace Stevens
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The wound kills that does not bleed. -- Wallace Stevens
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The mind can never be satisfied. -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir. -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening. -- Wallace Stevens
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Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good. -- Wallace Stevens
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One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls,
When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops.
He mocks the guinea, challenges
The crow, inciting various modes.
The sparrow requites one, without intent. -- Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is an abstraction bloodied. -- Wallace Stevens
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One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow -- Wallace Stevens
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The stars are putting on their glittering belts,
They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash
Like a great shadow's last embellishment -- Wallace Stevens
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Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation. -- Wallace Stevens
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The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire. -- Wallace Stevens
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It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade. -- Wallace Stevens
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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
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The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence. -- Wallace Stevens
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He heard her low accord,
Half prayer and half ditty,
And He felt a subtle quiver,
That was not heavenly love,
Or pity.
This is not writ
In any book. -- Wallace Stevens
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Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. -- Wallace Stevens
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Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends. -- Wallace Stevens
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Imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things. -- Wallace Stevens
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It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are. -- Wallace Stevens
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Revolution
Is the affair of logical lunatics. -- Wallace Stevens
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A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman. -- Wallace Stevens
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How red the rose that is the soldier -- Wallace Stevens
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The figures of the past go cloaked.
They walk in mist and rain and snow
And go, go slowly, but they go. -- Wallace Stevens
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The poet makes silk dresses out of worms. -- Wallace Stevens
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Tinsel in February, tinsel in August.
There are things in a man besides his reason. -- Wallace Stevens
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Sigh for me, night-wind, in the noisy leaves of the oak. / I am tired. Sleep for me, heaven over the hill. / Shout for me, loudly and loudly, joyful sun, when you rise. -- Wallace Stevens
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The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself. -- Wallace Stevens
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Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice -- Wallace Stevens
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People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it. -- Wallace Stevens
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Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the. -- Wallace Stevens
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Day after day, throughout the winter,
We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason
In a world of wind and frost ... -- Wallace Stevens
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Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. -- Wallace Stevens
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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
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An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church, but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses. -- Wallace Stevens
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You know that the nucleus of a time is not
The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind
Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed
As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins
Nor stand there making orotund consolations.
He shares the confusions of intelligence. -- Wallace Stevens
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The mind is smaller than the eye. -- Wallace Stevens
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Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through.
Have liberty not as the air within a grave
Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native,
In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate. -- Wallace Stevens
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The partaker partakes of that which changes him. The child that touches takes character from the thing, the body, it touches. -- Wallace Stevens
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The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay. -- Wallace Stevens
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I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it
was upon a hill. -- Wallace Stevens
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I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know. -- Wallace Stevens
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From Secret Man

The man of autumn,
Behind its melancholy mask,
Will laugh in the brown grass,
Will shout from the tower's rim. -- Wallace Stevens
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The heavy trees,
The grunting, shuffling branches, the robust,
The nocturnal, the antique, the blue-green pines
Deepen the feelings to inhuman depths. -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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The subject matter ... is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are. -- Wallace Stevens
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The thinker as reader reads what has been written.
He wears the words he reads to look upon
Within his being ... -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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I like Rhine wine, blue grapes, good cheese, endive and lots of books, etc., etc., etc., as much as I like supreme fiction. -- Wallace Stevens
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True villains are extremely photogenic. -- Wallace Stevens
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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 ... -- 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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For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. -- Wallace Stevens
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The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully. -- Wallace Stevens
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Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers. -- Wallace Stevens
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Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams? -- Wallace Stevens
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To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it. -- Wallace Stevens
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The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world ... -- Wallace Stevens
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The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her. -- Wallace Stevens
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There is a perfect rout of characters in every man - and every man is like an actor's trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things -- Wallace Stevens
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Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill; -- Wallace Stevens
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Just as my fingers on these keys make music, so the self-same sounds on my spirit make a music too. -- Wallace Stevens
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The truth is that there comes a time
When we can mourn no more over music
That is so much motionless sound -- Wallace Stevens
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Thought tends to collect in pools. -- Wallace Stevens
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We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold. -- Wallace Stevens
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Life is the elimination of what is dead. -- Wallace Stevens
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The mind is the great poem of winter, the man,
Who, to find what will suffice,
Destroys romantic tenements
Of rose and ice ... -- Wallace Stevens
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The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound. -- Wallace Stevens
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The winter is made and you have to bear it,
The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind,
For all the thoughts of summer that go with it
In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags ... -- Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance. -- Wallace Stevens
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Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking. -- Wallace Stevens
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Ethics are no more a part of poetry than theyare of painting. -- Wallace Stevens
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Who, then, are they, seated here?
Is the table a mirror in which they sit and look?
Are they men eating reflections of themselves? -- Wallace Stevens
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Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon ... -- Wallace Stevens
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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
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There may be always a time of innocence.
There is never a place. -- Wallace Stevens
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The consolations of space are nameless things.
It was after the neurosis of winter. It was
In the genius of summer that they blew up
The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds.
It took all day to quieten the sky
And then to refill its emptiness again ... -- Wallace Stevens
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Beauty is momentary in the mind
The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing. -- Wallace Stevens
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I am the angel of Reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door. -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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I am and have a being and play a part. -- Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is a finikin thing of air
That lives uncertainly and not for long
Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs. -- Wallace Stevens
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The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book. -- Wallace Stevens
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Behold
The approach of him whom none believes,
Whom all believe that all believe,
A pagan in a varnished car. -- Wallace Stevens
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The muddy rivers of spring
Are snarling
Under the muddy skies.
The mind is muddy. -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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One must read poetry with one's nerves. -- Wallace Stevens
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A pear should come to the table popped with juice,
Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms
Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist. -- Wallace Stevens
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What is one man among so many men?
What are so many men in such a world?
Can one man think one thing and think it long?
Can one man be one thing and be it long? -- Wallace Stevens
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Next to love is the desire for love. -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of the
moon.
It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing he
could be told.
It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know.
It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak. -- Wallace Stevens
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Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand. -- Wallace Stevens
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A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light. -- Wallace Stevens
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How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture. -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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The grackles sing avant the spring
Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly.
They sing right puissantly. -- Wallace Stevens
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The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying. -- Wallace Stevens
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Diaries are very futile. I must be all dream or all deed. It is quite impossible for me to express any of the beauty I feel to half the degree I feel it; and yet it is a great pleasure to seize an impression and lock it up in words: you feel as if you had it safe forever. -- Wallace Stevens
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Anything is beautiful if you say it is. -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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The imagination is man's power over nature. -- Wallace Stevens
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The old brown hen and the old blue sky,
Between the two we live and die
The broken cartwheel on the hill. -- Wallace Stevens
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The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father,
Because, in chief, it, only, can defend
Against itself. At its mercy, we depend
Upon it. -- Wallace Stevens
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We say
This changes and that changes. Thus the constant
Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths
Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause
In a universe of inconstancy. -- Wallace Stevens
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This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out
Of dirt ... It is not possible for the moon
To blot this with its dove-winged blendings. -- Wallace Stevens
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The way through the world
Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it. -- Wallace Stevens
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It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem. -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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Poetry increases the feeling for reality. -- Wallace Stevens
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The death of one god is the death of all. -- Wallace Stevens
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From the opening lines of the play Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise

All you need,
To find poetry,
Is to look for it with a lantern. -- Wallace Stevens
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I am what is around me. -- Wallace Stevens
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Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination. -- Wallace Stevens
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After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends. -- Wallace Stevens
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It matters, because everything we say
Of the past is description without place, a cast
Of the imagination, made in sound;
And because what we say of the future must portend,
Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to be
Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening. -- Wallace Stevens
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Imagination is the will of things ... -- Wallace Stevens
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The fire burns as the novel taught it how. -- Wallace Stevens
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Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals. -- Wallace Stevens
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How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality. The mortal no
Has its emptiness and tragic expirations. -- Wallace Stevens
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A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order.
These two things are one. -- Wallace Stevens
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Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble. -- Wallace Stevens
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The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha,
It held the shivering, the shaken limbs,
Then bathed its body in the leaping lake. -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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It was soldier's went marching over the rocks,
and still they came in watery flocks,
because it was spring and the birds had to come,
No doubt that soldier's had to be marching,
and that the drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,
Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost
Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly. -- Wallace Stevens
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Realism is a corruption of reality. -- Wallace Stevens
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Funest philosophers and ponderers,
Their evocations are the speech of clouds. -- Wallace Stevens
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Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail. -- Wallace Stevens
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All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence. -- Wallace Stevens
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He thought often of the land from which he came,
How that whole country was a melon, pink
If seen rightly and yet a possible red. -- Wallace Stevens
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They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture
Pleased that the irrational is rational -- Wallace Stevens
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If the hero is not a person, the emblem
Of him, even if Xenophon, seems
To stand taller than a person stands, has
A wider brow, large and less human
Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body
Of a primitive. -- Wallace Stevens
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Imagination ... is the irrepressible revolutionist. -- Wallace Stevens
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A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words. -- Wallace Stevens
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I was the world in which I walked. -- Wallace Stevens
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The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down. -- Wallace Stevens
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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
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Man is an eternal sophomore. -- Wallace Stevens
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One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be. -- Wallace Stevens
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From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist. -- Wallace Stevens
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A languid janitor bears
His lantern through colonnades
And the architecture swoons. -- Wallace Stevens
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From From the Journal of Crispin

There is a monotonous babbling in our dreams
That makes them our dependent heirs, the heirs
Of dreamers buried in our sleep, and not
The oncoming fantasies of better birth. -- Wallace Stevens
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What is there in life except one's ideas,
Good air, good friend, what is there in life? -- Wallace Stevens
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He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds, then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still the sky was blue. -- Wallace Stevens
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Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints. -- Wallace Stevens
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The death of Satan was a tragedy
For the imagination. -- Wallace Stevens
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After the final no there comes a yes. -- Wallace Stevens
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The wind,
Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry,
Came bluntly thundering, more terrible
Than the revenge of music on bassoons. -- Wallace Stevens
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There's no such thing as life; or if there is,
It is faster than the weather, faster than
Any character. It is more than any scene:
Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging. -- Wallace Stevens
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If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution. -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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All history is modern history. -- Wallace Stevens
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After a lustre of the moon, we say
We have not the need of any paradise,
We have not the need of any seducing hymn. -- Wallace Stevens
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Beneath every no lays a passion for yes that had never been broken. -- Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music. -- Wallace Stevens
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The lion sleeps in the sun.
its nose on its paws.
it can kill a man. -- Wallace Stevens
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Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts it becomes an epidemic. p901 -- Wallace Stevens
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The prologues are over. It is a question, now,
Of final belief. So, say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose. -- Wallace Stevens
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And what's above is in the past
As sure as all the angels are. -- Wallace Stevens
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I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos
The blackbird whistling
Or just after. -- Wallace Stevens
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Sentimentality is a failure of feeling. p.903 -- Wallace Stevens
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The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself. -- Wallace Stevens
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In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all. -- Wallace Stevens
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The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself. -- Wallace Stevens
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It is the mind that is woven, the mind that was jerked
And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun. -- Wallace Stevens
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Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof. -- Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is a means of redemption. -- Wallace Stevens
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We live in an old chaos of the sun. -- Wallace Stevens
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The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly. -- Wallace Stevens
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There is no wing like meaning -- Wallace Stevens
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The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become. -- Wallace Stevens
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Cold is our element and winter's air
Brings voices as of lions coming down. -- Wallace Stevens
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God and the imagination are one. -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written. -- Wallace Stevens
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Freedom is like a man who kills himself
Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife
Grows sharp in blood. -- Wallace Stevens
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I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow. -- Wallace Stevens
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Sombre as fir trees, liquid cats
Moved in the grass without a sound.
They did not know the grass went round.
The cats had cats and the grass turned gray
And the world had worlds, ai, this-a-way:
The grass turned green and the grass turned gray. -- Wallace Stevens
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Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic. -- Wallace Stevens
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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility. -- Wallace Stevens
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They said, "You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar. -- Wallace Stevens
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The sea
Severs not only lands but also selves. -- Wallace Stevens
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These are the ashes of fiery weather,
Of nights full of the green stars from Ireland,
Wet out of the sea, and luminously wet,
Like beautiful and abandonded refugees. -- Wallace Stevens
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Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches. -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have. -- Wallace Stevens
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All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas. -- Wallace Stevens
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A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one. -- Wallace Stevens
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Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore. -- Wallace Stevens
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One's ignorance is one's chief asset. -- Wallace Stevens
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Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark. -- Wallace Stevens
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How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend? -- Wallace Stevens
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Spring is umbilical or else it is not spring. -- Wallace Stevens
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The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing. -- Wallace Stevens
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Life is not free from its forms. -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so. -- Wallace Stevens
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Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. -- Wallace Stevens
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Everything possessed the power to transform itself, or else, and what meant more, to be transformed. -- Wallace Stevens
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Fromage and coffee and cognac and no gods. -- Wallace Stevens
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A poem is a meteor. -- Wallace Stevens
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I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office. -- Wallace Stevens
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The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks
And far beyond the discords of the wind. -- Wallace Stevens
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The physical world is meaningless tonight
And there is no other. -- Wallace Stevens
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At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply. -- Wallace Stevens
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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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It is never the thing but the version of the thing. -- Wallace Stevens
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The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes
Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism
Of machine within machine within machine. -- Wallace Stevens
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After the final no there come a yes, and on that yes a future world depends. -- Wallace Stevens
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It can never be satisfied, the mind, never. -- Wallace Stevens
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A change of style is a change of meaning. -- Wallace Stevens
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Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn. -- 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. -- Wallace Stevens
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Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal. -- Wallace Stevens
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Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into. -- Wallace Stevens
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Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them. -- Wallace Stevens
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One must have a mind of winter. -- Wallace Stevens
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To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,
As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,
To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,
As if the paradise of meaning ceased
To be paradise, it is this to be destitute. -- Wallace Stevens
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Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal. -- Wallace Stevens
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The point of vision and desire are the same. -- Wallace Stevens
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On a few words of what is real in the world
I nourish myself. I defend myself against
Whatever remains. -- Wallace Stevens
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If sex were all, then every trembling hand
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words. -- Wallace Stevens
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It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shrivelled forms
Crouched in the moonlight. -- Wallace Stevens
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There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it. -- Wallace Stevens
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Consider the odd morphology of regret. -- Wallace Stevens
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Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise! -- Wallace Stevens
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The poet is the priest of the invisible. -- Wallace Stevens
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The windy sky
Cries out a literate despair. -- Wallace Stevens
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The dry eucalyptus seeks god in the rainy cloud.
Professor Eucalyptus of New Haven seeks him
In New Haven. -- Wallace Stevens
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I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss. -- Wallace Stevens
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After a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door. -- Wallace Stevens
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Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art. -- Wallace Stevens
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Money is a kind of poetry. -- Wallace Stevens
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It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window. -- Wallace Stevens
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To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind. -- Wallace Stevens
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Words of the world are the life of the world. -- Wallace Stevens
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Above the forest of the parakeets,
A parakeet of parakeets prevails,
A pip of life amid a mort of tails. -- Wallace Stevens
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It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur. -- Wallace Stevens
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It is time that beats in the breast and it is time
That batters against the mind, silent and proud,
The mind that knows it is destroyed by time. -- Wallace Stevens
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Of what is real I say,
Is it the old, the roseate parent or
The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else
The spirit and all ensigns of the self? -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us. -- Wallace Stevens
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There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf. -- Wallace Stevens
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Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom. -- Wallace Stevens
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A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. -- Wallace Stevens
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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. -- Wallace Stevens
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Disillusion is the last illusion. -- Wallace Stevens
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The summer night is like a perfection of thought. -- Wallace Stevens
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We say God and the imagination are one ...
How high that highest candle lights the dark. -- Wallace Stevens
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Youngish artists have a way of being melancholy. It may be that this is merely a symptom of the distress they feel at the absence of definition. They have no very distinct outline either of themselves or of the abstractions that bedevil them. They are, in short, likely to be a bit baffled. -- Wallace Stevens
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Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential. -- Wallace Stevens
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I am one of you and being one of you is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary Angel of earth, since, in my sight, you see the earth again ... -- Wallace Stevens
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In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination. -- Wallace Stevens
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It is good death
That puts an end to evil death and dies. -- Wallace Stevens
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The yellow glistens. It glistens with various yellows, Citrons, oranges and greens Flowering over the skin. -- Wallace Stevens
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The word is the making of the world -- Wallace Stevens
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The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one's desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair. -- 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
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It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom. -- Wallace Stevens
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It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea. -- Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right. -- Wallace Stevens
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The salt hung on his spirit like a frost,
The dead brine melted in him like a dew
Of winter, until nothing of himself
Remained, except some starker, barer self
In a starker, barer world, in which the sun
Was not the sun because it never shone
With bland complaisance ... -- Wallace Stevens
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The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos. -- Wallace Stevens
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God is in me or else is not at all. -- Wallace Stevens
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All poetry is experimental poetry. -- Wallace Stevens
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Make the visible a little hard to see. -- Wallace Stevens
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My tribute to mystical, magical trees that the Cherokee called "standing people ... " -- Wallace Stevens
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God is gracious to some very peculiar people. -- 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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Poetry is the scholar's art. -- Wallace Stevens
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After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption. -- Wallace Stevens
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It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most.
It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.
This is the tragic accent of the scene. -- Wallace Stevens
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I have said no
To everything, in order to get at myself.
I have wiped away moonlight like mud ... -- Wallace Stevens
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Tell X that speech is not dirty silence
Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier. -- Wallace Stevens
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Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress. -- Wallace Stevens
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As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible. -- Wallace Stevens
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The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies. -- Wallace Stevens
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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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The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life. -- Wallace Stevens
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Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container. -- Wallace Stevens
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The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. -- Wallace Stevens
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Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world -- Wallace Stevens
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Unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere. -- Wallace Stevens
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It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self. -- Wallace Stevens
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What's down below is in the past
Like last night's crickets, far below. -- Wallace Stevens
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The night
Makes everything grotesque. Is it because
Night is the nature of man's interior world? -- Wallace Stevens
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The imperfect is our paradise. -- Wallace Stevens
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We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession. -- Wallace Stevens
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The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. -- Wallace Stevens
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To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems. -- Wallace Stevens
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It is the belief and not the god that counts. -- Wallace Stevens