Wallace Stevens Quotes

We say God and the imagination are one . . .How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill.

In poetry you must love the words the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Poetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of themoon.It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing hecould 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.

From oriole to crow, note the declineIn music. Crow is realist. But, then,Oriole, also, may be realist.

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 writIn any book.

Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking fromThe weight of primary noon ...