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About this quote

What does it mean?
Poetry transforms private confusion into shared language and back again.
In plain terms
Poems turn private confusion into shared words.
What can you take from it?
Art translates personal confusion into common understanding.

Where it applies

  • writing
  • teaching
  • therapy

Putting it to work

  • write freely
  • share drafts
  • edit clarity

Questions to consider

  • What is gibberish?
  • How is meaning made?

Another view

Some ideas remain incommunicable.

More from Wallace Stevens

  1. A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.

    Permalink to quote #142
  2. Is there a poem that never reaches words And one that chaffers the time away? Is the poem both peculiar and general? There's a meditation there, in which there…

    Permalink to quote #144
  3. Clothe me entire in the final filament, So that I tremble with such love so known And myself am precious for your perfecting.

    Permalink to quote #141

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