38 Wallace Stevens Quotes on Reality

Wallace Stevens quotes on reality

11. This will make widows wince. But fictive things Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

14. One might have thought of sight, but who could think Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees? Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound, But the dark italics it could not propound. And out of what sees and hears and out Of what one feels, who could have thought to make So many selves, so many sensuous worlds, As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming With the metaphysical changes that occur, Merely in living as and where we live.

15. I am the angel of reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door.

16. I am one of you and being one of you Is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary angel of earth, Since, in my sight, you see the earth again, Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings, Like watery words awash; like meanings said By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not, Myself, only half a figure of a sort, A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man Of the mind, an apparition appareled in Apparels of such lightest look that a turn Of my shoulders and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

39. Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, Into twenty villages, Or one man Crossing a single bridge into a village.

44. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

45. Take from the dresser of deal, Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once And spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

48. That strange flower, the sun, Is just what you say. Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad.

49. That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say. That savage of fire, That seed, Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad.

53. O thin men of Haddam, Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird Walks around the feet Of the women about you?

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.

65. Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry, Of the torches wisping in the underground, Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light. There are no shadows in our sun, Day is desire and night is sleep. There are no shadows anywhere. The earth, for us, is flat and bare. There are no shadows.

78. Things as they are have been destroyed. Have I? Am I a man that is dead At a table on which the food is cold? Is my thought a memory, not alive? Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood And whichever it may be, is it mine?

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?

90. 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.

91. Here is the bread of time to come, Here is its actual stone. The bread Will be our bread, the stone will be Our bed and we shall sleep by night. We shall forget by day, except The moments when we choose to play The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

99. Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

105. Not to be realized because not to Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because Not to be realized.

108. It must be visible or invisible, Invisible or visible or both: A seeing and unseeing in the eye. The weather and the giant of the weather, Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air: An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought.

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.

137. Eye without lid, mind without any dream - These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy, Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a bird Of stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you And you, bethou him and bethou. It is A sound like any other. It will end.

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

155. We reason of these things with later reason And we make of what we see, what we see clearly And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.

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.

167. These external regions, what do we fill them with Except reflections

172. You remain the more than natural figure. You Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational Distortion, however fragrant, however dear. That's it: the more than rational distortion, The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.

174. Soldier, there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends.

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.

182. Reality is the beginning not the end, Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega, Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals.

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.

193. Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction.

195. That scrawny cry - It was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun, Surrounded by its choral rings, Still far away. It was like A new knowledge of reality.

196. One of the limits of reality Presents itself in Oley when the hay, Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.: Things stop in that direction and since they stop The direction stops and we accept what is As good. The utmost must be good and is:

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.

216. The world is a force not a presence.

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.