The Collected Poems Quotes

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

“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, The Collected Poems

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

“The Snow Man"

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. (Vintage; Reissue edition February 19, 1990)”
― Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems

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

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

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

“Perhaps,
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.”
― Wallace Stevens, 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, 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, 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, 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, The Collected Poems

“The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair.”
― Wallace Stevens, 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, The Collected Poems

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

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

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

“It is good death
That puts an end to evil death and dies.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems

“The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
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."
And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems

“Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood. The armies kill themselves, And in their blood an ancient evil dies— The action of incorrigible tragedy.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

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

“The sky would be full of bodies like wood.
There would have been cries of the dead
And the living would be speaking,
As a self that lives on itself.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems

“Six Significant Landscapes"

I
An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.

II
The night is of the colour
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.

III
I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.

IV
When my dream was near the moon,
The white folds of its gown
Filled with yellow light.
The soles of its feet
Grew red.
Its hair filled
With certain blue crystallizations
From stars,
Not far off.

V
Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.

VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses --
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon --
Rationalists would wear sombreros.”
― Wallace Stevens, 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, The Collected Poems