Wallace Stevens Quotes About Poetry

Quotes about: Poetry

• The poet is the priest of the invisible.

  Wallace Stevens

  Poetry, Invisible, Priests

  Opus Posthumous (1957) "Adagia"

• A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

  Wallace Stevens

  Writing, Men, Poetry

• At evening casual flocks of pigeons make
  Ambiguous undulations as they sink
  Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

  Wallace Stevens

  Wings, Poetry, Darkness

  'Sunday Morning, I' (1923)

• Money is a kind of poetry.

  Wallace Stevens

  Poetry, Kind, Making Money

  Quoted in Harper's, Oct 1985.

• The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.

  Wallace Stevens

  Poetry, Purpose, Poetry Is

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose”, p.243, Vintage

• Poetry is a means of redemption.

  Wallace Stevens

  Mean, Poetry, Redemption

  1957 Opus Posthumous, Aphorisms,'Adagia'.

• The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.

  Wallace Stevens

  Poetry, Dresses, Worms

  1957 Opus Posthumous, Aphorisms,'Adagia'.

• The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

  Wallace Stevens

  Success, Poetry, Intelligence

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Selected Poems”, p.184, Knopf

• 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

  War, Moon, Night

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play”, p.302, Vintage

• All poetry is experimental poetry.

  Wallace Stevens

  Poetry, Poetry Is

  1957 Opus Posthumous, Aphorisms,'Adagia'.

• 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

  Confusion, Poetry, Effort

  Wallace Stevens (1964). “the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”

• It is never the thing but the version of the thing:
  The fragrance of the woman not her self,
  Her self in her manner not the solid block,
  The day in its color not perpending time,
  Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord,
  The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.

  Wallace Stevens

  Time, Block, Self

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.332, Vintage

• 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

  Real, Poetry, Perception

• 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

  Poetry, Achieve, Music Is

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose”, p.318, Vintage

• 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

  Art, Poetry, Style

  Wallace Stevens (1997). “Collected Poetry and Prose”

• Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.

  Wallace Stevens

  Art, Poetry, Desire

• Poetry is a finikin thing of air
  That lives uncertainly and not for long
  Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

  Wallace Stevens

  Air, Long, Poetry

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.155, Vintage

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