Famous Quotes by Wallace Stevens
- That would be waving and that would be crying,
Crying and shouting and meaning... More
- As part of nature he is part of us.
His rarities are ours: may they be fit
And reconcile... More
- Canaries in the morning, orchestras
In the afternoon, balloons at night. That is
A... More
- Politic man ordained
Imagination as the fateful sin.
Grandmother and her basketful of... More
- A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have. More
- How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend? More
- The imagination is man’s power over nature. More
- Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them. More
- Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the... More
- Intolerance respecting other people’s religion is toleration itself in comparison with... More
- To-morrow when the sun,
For all your images,
Comes up as the sun, bull fire,
Your... More
- With my whole body I taste these peaches,
I touch them and smell them. Who speaks?
I... More
- Who can think of the sun costuming clouds
When all people are shaken
Or of night... More
- The mind is smaller than the eye. More
- Abba, dark death is the breaking of a glass.
The dazzled flakes and splinters... More
- This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince. More
- Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from... More
- It was like passing a boundary to dive
Into the sun-filled water, brightly leafed
And... More
- We enjoy the ithy oonts and long-haired
Plomets, as the Herr Gott
Enjoys his comets. More
- If from the earth we came, it was an earth
That bore us as a part of all the things
It... More
- The soul, he said, is composed
Of the external world. More
- The dress of a woman of Lhasa,
In its place,
Is an invisible element of that... More
- I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly... More
- And the beauty
Of the moonlight
Falling there,
Falling
As sleep falls
In the... More
- Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth... More
- Only last year he said that the naked moon
Was not the moon he used to see, to feel
(In... More
- Suppose these houses are composed of ourselves,
So that they become an impalpable town, full... More
- Say next to holiness is the will thereto,
And next to love is the desire for love,
The... More
- The dry eucalyptus seeks god in the rainy cloud.
Professor Eucalyptus of New Haven seeks... More
- Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense... More
- The poem is the cry of its occasion,
Part of the res itself and not about it. More
- The consolations of space are nameless things.
It was after the neurosis of winter. It... More
- Professor Eucalyptus said, “The search
For reality is as momentous as
The search for... More
- The point of vision and desire are the same. More
- A scholar, in his Segmenta, left a note,
As follows, “The Ruler of Reality,
If more... More
- The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world ... More
- Under the eglantine
The fretful concubine
Said, “Phooey! Phoo!”
She whispered,... More
- And the chandeliers are neat . . .
But their mignon, marblish glare!
We are cold, the... More
- Finally, in the last year of her age,
Having attained a present blessedness,
She said... More
- A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the... More
- with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we... More
- the windy sky
Cries out a literate despair. More
- We do not prove the existence of the poem.
It is something seen and known in lesser... More
- One poem proves another and the whole,
For the clairvoyant men that need no proof:
The... More
- Only the rich remember the past,
The strawberries once in the Apennines,
Philadelphia... More
- Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.
This arrival in the wild country of the soul ... More
- The prologues are over. It is a question, now,
Of final belief. So, say that final... More
- Clandestine steps upon imagined stairs
Climb through the night, because his cuckoos call. More
- The philosophers’ man alone still walks in dew,
Still by the sea-side mutters milky... More
- A lady dying of diabetes
Listened to the radio,
Catching the lesser dithyrambs.
So... More
- He sought an earthly leader who could stand
Without panache, without cockade,
Son only of... More
- The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The... More
- Yet there was a man within me
Could have risen to the clouds,
Could have touched these... More
- The wound kills that does not bleed.
It has no nurse nor kin to know
Nor kin to care. More
- The night
Makes everything grotesque. Is it because
Night is the nature of man’s... More
- Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of the stone steps.
The sky is a blue... More
- Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!
Damned... More
- Panoramas are not what they used to be.
Claude has been dead a long time
And apostrophes... More
- And what’s above is in the past
As sure as all the angels are. More
- What’s down below is in the past
Like last night’s crickets, far below. More
- The reflection of her here, and then there,
Is another shadow, another evasion,
Another... More
- Our sense of these things changes and they change,
Not as in metaphor, but in our... More
- These are the small townsmen of death,
A man and a woman, like two leaves
That keep... More
- Out of the first warmth of spring,
And out of the shine of the menlocks,
Among the bare... More
- You were created of your name, the word
Is that of which you were the personage.
There is... More
- Someone has left for a ride in a balloon
Or in a bubble examines the bubble of air. More
- People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,
Summer is changed to winter, the young grow... More
- My solitaria
Are the meditations of a central mind.
I hear the motions of the spirit and... More
- To say more than human things with human voice,
That cannot be; to say human things with... More
- Imagination is the will of things. . . . More
- A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are... More
- The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind, If one may say so. More
- A. Well, an old order is a violent one.
This proves nothing. Just one more truth, one... More
- The old brown hen and the old blue sky,
Between the two we live and die
The broken... More
- Rosenbloom is dead.
The tread of the carriers does not halt
On the hill, but turns
Up... More
- Now, the wry Rosenbloom is dead
And his finical carriers tread,
On a hundred legs, the... More
- I sang a canto in a canton,
Cunning-coo, O, cuckoo cock,
In a canton of Belshazzar
To... More
- These days of disinheritance, we feast
On human heads. True, birds rebuild
Old nests and... More
- He heard her low accord,
Half prayer and half ditty,
And He felt a subtle... More
- In the land of turkeys in turkey weather
At the base of the statue, we go round and... More
- Thus the theory of description matters most.
It is the theory of the word for those
For... More
- Her green mind made the world around her green. More
- Lenin on a bench beside a lake disturbed
The swans. He was not the man for swans. More
- The sun is an example. What it seems
It is and in such seeming all things are. More
- Description is revelation. It is not
The thing described, nor false facsimile.
It is an... More
- The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire. More
- Tonight there are only the winter stars.
The sky is no longer a junk-shop,
Full of... More
- The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns. More
- Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In... More
- Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the... More
- Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning... More
- It was soldiers went marching over the rocks
And still the birds came, came in watery... More
- Freedom is like a man who kills himself
Each night, an incessant butcher, whose... More
- The flags are natures newly found.
Rifles grow sharper on the sight.
There is a rumble of... More
- Angry men and furious machines
Swarm from the little blue of the horizon
To the great... More
- Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way. More
- For the soldier of time, it breathes a summer sleep,
In which his wound is good because... More
- The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire
Is... More
- The death of Satan was a tragedy
For the imagination. More
- His firm stanzas hang like hives in hell
Or what hell was, since now both heaven and... More
Dictionary Tip:
Lookup any word on eNotes with our dictionary. Highlight the word and press SHIFT + D for a definition, or SHIFT + T for a synonym.
