18 Wallace Stevens Quotes on Philosophy

Wallace Stevens quotes on philosophy

6. How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

19. I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite.

43. One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

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.

81. What is there in life except one's ideas. Good air, good friend, what is there in life? Is it ideas that I believe?

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.

118. The major abstraction is the idea of man And major man is its exponent, abler In the abstract than in his singular, More fecund as principle than particle

123. The bees came booming as if they had never gone, As if hyacinths had never gone. We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy. This means Night-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.

160. The nothingness was a nakedness, a point, Beyond which fact could not progress as fact. Thereon the learning of the man conceived Once more night's pale illuminations, gold Beneath, far underneath, the surface of His eye and audible in the mountain of His ear, the very material of his mind.

163. But to impose is not To discover. To discover an order as of A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all, Out of nothing to have come on major weather, It is possible, possible, possible. It must Be possible. It must be that in time The real will from its crude compoundings come, Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike, Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real, To be stripped of every fiction except one, The fiction of an absolute - Angel, Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear The luminous melody of proper sound.

170. Perhaps, The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, But he that of repetition is most master.

177. A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one.

181. It is not in the premise that reality Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

186. For the poet, the imagination is paramount, and . . . he dwells apart in his imagination, as the philosopher dwells in his reason, and as the priest dwells in his belief ... The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.'

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.

200. This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing

201. We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark. Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough.

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.