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"Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals."
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), U.S. poet. "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." |
"No self in the mass: the braver being,
The body that could never be wounded,
The life that never would end, no matter
Who died, the being that was an abstraction."
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), U.S. poet. "Gigantomachia." |
"Swiftly in the nights,
In the porches of Key West,
Behind the bougainvilleas
After the guitar is asleep,
Lasciviously as the wind,
You come tormenting."
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), U.S. poet. "O Florida, Venereal Soil." |
"Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,
The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates
Of snails, musician of pears, principium
And lex. Sed quæritur: is this same wig
Of things, this nincompated pedagogue,
Preceptor to the sea?"
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), U.S. poet. "The Comedian as the Letter C.." |
"What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality."
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), U.S. poet. "Three Academic Pieces," no. 1, The Necessary Angel (first published 1947, repr. 1951). |
"The poem is the cry of its occasion,
Part of the res itself and not about it."
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), U.S. poet. "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." |
"Once it was, the repose of night,
Was a place, strong place, in which to sleep.
It is shaken now. It will burst into flames,
Either now or tomorrow or the day after that."
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), U.S. poet. "Girl in a Nightgown." |
"It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind."
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), U.S. poet. Of Modern Poetry (l. 25-28). . .
Collected Poems [Stevie Smith]. James MacGibbon, ed. (1976) New Directions. |
"The wind,
Tempestuous clarion, with heavy cry,
Came bluntly thundering, more terrible
Than the revenge of music on bassoons."
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), U.S. poet. "The Comedian as the Letter C.." |
"So, too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folklore of the world of the radio—remarks made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales—we should recognize him as below the level of nature but not as below the level of the imagination."
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), U.S. poet. "Three Academic Pieces," no. 1, The Necessary Angel (1947, repr. 1951). |
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Wallace Stevens
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