4 Wallace Stevens Quotes on Society

Wallace Stevens quotes on society

1. One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.

18. Success as a result of industry is a peasant ideal.

145. He tries by a peculiar speech to speak The peculiar potency of the general

219. Post-religious man, as Stevens saw him, still had a deep need for the kind of exaltation of the body and spirit which goes under different names in different religions - Christians call it grace, that is, the feeling or knowledge that the workings of God are revealed to the individual, thus lifting him or her up to a state of ecstatic consciousness. ... For the romantics in general such moments of ecstasis in the midst of nature are experienced by the solitary imagination, and the bonds of society are cast away as unimportant. Stevens once said that the romantic is a falsification, and perhaps the reason for the comment was his feeling that such moments of ecstatic relation in the midst of nature had to be given a social and eventually political meaning, rather than remaining in the arena of the spirit. Stevens poetry then offers a pastoral romantic ecstasis that become the occasions for searching out the relations between the individual, his or her community and the natural world.