The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos. Wallace Stevens More Quotes by Wallace Stevens More Quotes From Wallace Stevens I am what is around me. Wallace Stevens The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully. Wallace Stevens intelligence poetry success One must read poetry with one's nerves. Wallace Stevens nerves 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 pain loneliness summer God and the imagination are one. Wallace Stevens candle-lights candle imagination I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office. Wallace Stevens six office nine She says, "But in contentment I still feel The need for imperishable bliss." Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires. Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang? Wallace Stevens mother dream death For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. Wallace Stevens listeners snow People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it. Wallace Stevens snow children people It is never the thing but the version of the thing. Wallace Stevens versions Beauty is momentary in the mind -- The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing. Wallace Stevens mind beauty life 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. Wallace Stevens autumn imagination fall Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough. Wallace Stevens light dwelling air I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me. Wallace Stevens real Poetry is the scholar's art. Wallace Stevens scholar poetry-is art The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life. Wallace Stevens real play art Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires. Wallace Stevens mother dream beauty Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic. Wallace Stevens infection epidemics thinking A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have. Wallace Stevens doe writing needs How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture. Wallace Stevens trifles furniture rooms
