Wallace Stevens Quotes - Page 2

The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.

I was the world in which I walked.

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.

A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.

The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.

Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail.

Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates.

Poetry increases the feeling for reality.

Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.

Anything is beautiful if you say it is.

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

Realism is a corruption of reality.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world

The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.

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

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse Without a rider on a road at night. The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.

All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.

Next to love is the desire for love.

The imagination is man's power over nature.

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.

I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.

They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'