17 Wallace Stevens Quotes on Truth

Wallace Stevens quotes on truth

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.

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.

56. A few things for themselves, Florida, venereal soil, Disclose to the lover.

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?

95. So poisonous Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to The truth itself, the first idea becomes The hermit in a poet's metaphors, Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.

98. The poem, through candor, brings back a power again That gives a candid kind to everything.

109. Perhaps The truth depends on a walk around a lake, A composing as the body tires, a stop To see hepatica, a stop to watch A definition growing certain and A wait within that certainty, a rest In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake. Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence

140. I am the spouse. She took her necklace off And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt. I am the spouse, divested of bright gold, The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst, Beyond the burning body that I bear. I am the woman stripped more nakedly Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

205. Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

220. At the heart of many of Stevens's poems are harsh and unpalatable experiences revealed only gradually through his intense stylization.