WALLACE Stevens IS A 20TH-CENTURY AMERICAN POET.
“The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.”
~ Wallace Stevens, The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.”
~ Wallace Stevens, Le Monocle de Mon Oncle
How high that highest candle lights the dark.”
~ Wallace Stevens, Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
~ Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man
Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.”
~ Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”
~ Wallace Stevens, Tea at the Palaz of Hoon
It glistens with various yellows,
Citrons, oranges and greens
Flowering over the skin.”
~ Wallace Stevens, Study of Two Pears
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill”
~ Wallace Stevens, A Postcard from the Volcano
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, The Plain Sense of Things
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.”
~ Wallace Stevens, Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
Makes me conceive how dark I have become,”
~ Wallace Stevens, The Sun This March
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
Hills and a cloud.”
~ Wallace Stevens, Of the Surface of Things
Passions of rain, or moods in 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 bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.”
~ Wallace Stevens, The Sun This March
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.”
~ Wallace Stevens, The Sun This March
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.”
~ Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
“After all the pretty contrast of life and death
Proves that these opposite things partake of one,
At least that was the theory, when bishops' books
Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that.
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,
If one may say so. And yet relation appears,
A small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.”
~ Wallace Stevens, Connoisseur of Chaos
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires.”
~ Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning
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, Peter Quince at the Clavier