Quotes from The Collected Poems

“The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

“The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

“It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

“Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The boughs of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

“The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

“From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

“Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On on another, as Logos depends
On Eros, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.

Music falls on the silence like a sense
A passion that we feel, not understand.
Morning and afternoon are clasped together

And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away together as one in the greenest body.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

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

“The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from 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, quote from The Collected Poems

“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, quote from The Collected Poems

“Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.
Use dusky words and dusky images.
Darken your speech.

Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,
But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,
Conceiving words,

As the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence,
And out of their droning sibilants makes
A serenade.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

“The villages slept as the capable man went down,
Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive,
The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds,
As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed,
Impatient of the bells and midnight forms,
Rode over the picket docks, rode down the road,
And, capable, created in his mind,
Eventual victor, out of the martyr's bones,
The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

“Spring is umbilical or else it is not spring.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

“A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts"

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

“The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

“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, quote from The Collected Poems

“Consider the odd morphology of regret.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

“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, quote from The Collected Poems

“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, quote from The Collected Poems

“The law of chaos is the law of ideas,
Of improvisations and seasons of belief.

Ideas are men. The mass of meaning and
The mass of men are one. Chaos is not

The mass of meaning. It is three or four
Ideas, or, say, five men or, possibly, six.

In the end, these philosophic assassins pull
Revolvers and shoot each other. One remains.

The mass of meaning becomes composed again.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

“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, quote from The Collected Poems

“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, quote from The Collected Poems

“The death of one god is the death of all.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

“A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

“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, quote from The Collected Poems

“The dry eucalyptus seeks god in the rainy cloud.
Professor Eucalyptus of New Haven seeks him
In New Haven.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

“The Plain Sense of Things"

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.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

“I am and have a being and play a part.”
― Wallace Stevens, quote from The Collected Poems

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