Wallace Stevens Quotes on Language
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Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns, Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous, Eliciting the still sustaining pomps Of speech which are like music so profound They seem an exaltation without sound.
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Throw away the lights, the definitions, And say of what you see in the dark That it is this or that it is that, But do not use the rotted names. How should you walk in that space and know Nothing of the madness of space, Nothing of its jocular procreations? Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand Between you and the shapes you take When the crust of shape has been destroyed.
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Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis, Incipit and a form to speak the word And every latent double in the word, Beau linguist.
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He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase, Or power of the wave, or deepened speech, Or a leaner being, moving in on him, Of greater aptitude and apprehension, As if the waves at last were never broken, As if the language suddenly, with ease, Said things it had laboriously spoken.
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The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance Are parts of apotheosis, appropriate And of its nature, the idiom thereof.
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The poem goes form the poet's gibberish to The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.
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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 seems To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or Not apprehended well. Does the poet Evade us, as in a senseless element?
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He tries by a peculiar speech to speak The peculiar potency of the general
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The words they spoke were voices that she heard. She looked at them and saw them as they were And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.
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The soldier is poor without the poet's lines, His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick, Inevitably modulating, in the blood. And war for war, each has its gallant kind. How simply the fictive hero becomes the real; How gladly with proper words the solider dies, If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.
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Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.