Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955 / Pennsylvania / United States)

''Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven.''

''That other one wanted to think his way to life,
Sure that the ultimate poem was the mind,
Or of the mind, or of the mind in these
Elysia, these days, half earth, half mind;
Half sun, half thinking of the sun; half sky,
Half desire for indifference about the sky.''

''How clean the sun when seen in its idea,
Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven
That has expelled us and our images . . .
The death of one god is the death of all.
Let purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest,
Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber....''

''There may be always a time of innocence.
There is never a place.''

''The sorry verities!
Yet in excess, continual,
There is cure of sorrow.''

''Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.''

''It had been cold since December. Snow fell, first,
At New Year and, from then until April, lay
On everything. Now it had melted, leaving
The gray grass like a pallet, closely pressed;
And dirt. The wind blew in the empty place.''

''Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.''

''We stand in the tumult of a festival.
What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?
These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?
These musicians dubbing at a tragedy,
A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this:
That there are no lines to speak? There is no play.''

''It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.''