37 Wallace Stevens Quotes on Art

Wallace Stevens quotes on art

9. 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.

10. We agree in principle. That's clear. But take The opposing law and make a peristyle, And from the peristyle project a masque Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness, Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, Is equally converted into palms, Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm, Madame, we are where we began.

20. Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words.

21. I placed a jar in Tennessee And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose upon it, And sprawled around, no longer wild.

22. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.

26. Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the self-same sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound; And thus it is that what I feel, Here in this room, desiring you, Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, Is music.

32. Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left only Death's ironic scraping. Now, in its immortality, it plays On the clear viol of her memory, And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

40. This is old song That will not declare itself...

54. I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.

59. These Are the music of meet resignation; these The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you To magnify, if in that drifting waste You are to be accompanied by more Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

60. She sang beyond the genius of the sea

62. 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.'

63. If to serenade almost to man Is to miss, by that, things as they are, Say that it is the serenade Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

66. The thinking of art seems final when The thinking of god is smoky dew.

69. And the color, the overcast blue Of the air, in which the blue guitar Is a form, described but difficult, And I am merely a shadow hunched Above the arrowy, still string, The maker of a thing yet to be made; The color like a thought that grows Out of a mood, the tragic robe Of the actor, half his gesture, half His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk Sodden with his melancholy words, The weather of his stage, himself.

74. I know that timid breathing. Where Do I begin and end? And where, As I strum the thing, do I pick up That which momentously declares Itself not to be I and yet Must be. It could be nothing else.

83. Poetry is the subject of the poem, From this the poem issues and To this returns. Between the two, Between issue and return, there is An absence in reality, Things as they are. Or so we say. But are these separate?

96. The monastic man is an artist.The philosopher Appoints man's place in music, say, today. But the priest desires. The philosopher desires. And not to have is the beginning of desire. To have what is not is its ancient cycle.

98. The poem, through candor, brings back a power again That gives a candid kind to everything.

103. Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.

116. My dame, sing for this person accurate songs.

121. It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect The final elegance, not to console Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.

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

151. The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window Did not desire that feathery argentines Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them

184. The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

187. The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art... in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it.

188. What the poet has in mind . . . is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination. The poet tries to exemplify it, in part as I have tried to exemplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives.

192. The paramount relation between poetry and painting today, between modern man and modern art, is simply this: that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince.

197. Let's see the very thing and nothing else. Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight. Burn everything not part of it to ash. Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky Without evasion by a single metaphor. Look at it in its essential barrenness And say this, this is the centre that I seek.

199. Light the first light of evening, as in a room In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good.

204. A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.

205. Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

206. A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.

209. Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.

214. To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

217. Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.

220. At the heart of many of Stevens's poems are harsh and unpalatable experiences revealed only gradually through his intense stylization.