12 Wallace Stevens Quotes on Meaning

Wallace Stevens quotes on meaning

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

42. The boots of the men clump On the boards of the bridge. The first white wall of the village Rises through fruit-trees. Of what was it I was thinking? So the meaning escapes.

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

112. Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis, Incipit and a form to speak the word And every latent double in the word, Beau linguist.

134. An unaffected man in a negative light Could not have borne his labor nor have died Sighing that he should leave the banjo's twang.

143. The poem goes form the poet's gibberish to The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.

144. 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?

183. It may be dismissed, on the one hand, as a commonplace aesthetic satisfaction: and, on the other hand, if we say that the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called, even if poetry that involves us vitally, the feeling of deliverance, of a release, of a perfection touched, of a vocation so that all men may know the truth and that the truth may set them free - if we say these things and if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplished its purpose, would have seemed, whether young or old, whether in rags or ceremonial robe, a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation. This may be a gross exaggeration of a very simple matter. But perhaps the same is true of many of the more prodigious things of life and death.

191. The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.

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

211. To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as having something to say.

218. Stevens' way of informing us comes in language and imagery so radically different from previous times that it is difficult to recognize exactly what he means. But throughout his poetry he speaks, like the mystics, primarily of the nature of our relationship with the universe. He continually circles back to the idea that we actively participate in what the world looks like and what it means. Although cast in modern terms, this idea is profoundly spiritual and moral. Since he gives no evidence of any direct visionary experience, it's not possible to say Stevens is a 'mystic' or a 'contemplative' poet. But he is a major figure in modern poetry because he synthesizes the concerns of the modern world - the emphasis on the human self as maker of meaning, the emphasis on scientific rationality, the emphasis on creating new forms to replace outmoded beliefs - with the perennial concerns of the human spirit. To find meaning, or the good - or by implication, God - we need to radically adjust our conception of reality. This takes powerful acts of individual imagination, and the possibilities are immense... Contrary to all appearances, to the difficulty of his verse, and to the preoccupied, distracted interpretations of contemporary critics, Wallace Stevens' poetry is a profoundly spiritual force. Anyone interested in the spiritual problems of modern humans must reckon with it.