Wallace Stevens Quotes

“I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.”
― Wallace Stevens, Harmonium

“A poem is a meteor.”
― Wallace Stevens

“(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.”
― Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate

“(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea of God.”
― Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate

“the lion sleeps in the sun.
its nose on its paws.
it can kill a man.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems

“Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems

“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, The Collected Poems

“Sometimes you must go too far to see what would suffice.”
― Rodney Ross, The Cool Part of His Pillow

“To create the new we must first de-create the old; and the reality of decreation (as Stevens called it, borrowing the word from Simone Weil) is as strong as the reality of creation.”
― Helen Vendler, Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire

“There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems

“And for what, except for you, do I feel love?
Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man
Close to me, hidden in me day and night?
In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,
Equal in living changingness to the light
In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,
For a moment in the central of our being,
The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems

“The slow maturation of genuine creativity looks like laziness to a committee. Wallace Stevens was forty-three when his first book appeared. Robert Frost was thirty-nine. Today these sluggards would be unemployable.”
― Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture

“XVI

It is true, as someone has said, that in
A world without heaven all is farewell.
Whether you wave your hand or not,

It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes
It is still farewell, and if you pretend not to notice,
Hating what passes, it is still farewell.

Farewell no matter what. And the palms as they lean
Over the green, bright lagoon, and the pelicans
Diving, and the glistening bodies of bathers resting,

Are stages in an ultimate stillness, and the movement
Of sand, and of wind, and the secret moves of the body
Are part of the same, a simplicity that turns being

Into an occasion for mourning, or into an occasion
Worth celebrating, for what else does one do,
Feeling the weight of the pelicans' wings,

The density of the palms' shadows, the cells that darken
The backs of bathers? These are beyond the distortions
Of change, beyond the evasions of music. The end

Is enacted again and again. And we feel it
In the temptations of sleep, in the moon's ripening,
In the wine as it waits in the glass.”
― Mark Strand, Dark Harbor. A Poem