Wallace Stevens
Realism is a corruption of reality.Collection: Reality
To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.Collection: World
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.Collection: Real
The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.Collection: Poetry
Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.Collection: Strange
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.Collection: Opposites
Poetry is the scholar's art.Collection: Art
It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I've lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life.Collection: Jobs
All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.Collection: Nature
The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.Collection: Dark
A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words.Collection: Poet
A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order. These two things are one.Collection: Order
I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.Collection: Sea
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.'Collection: Men
We must endure our thoughts all night, until the bright obvious stands motionless in the cold.Collection: Death
It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.Collection: Funny Basketball
The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.Collection: Play
Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.Collection: Reality
Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.Collection: Poetry Is
The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction.Collection: Lying
Anything is beautiful if you say it is.Collection: Beautiful
The imperfect is our paradise.Collection: Paradise
The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives.Collection: Light
Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.Collection: Flower
Beauty is momentary in the mind -- The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing.Collection: Life
We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession.Collection: Truth
Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.Collection: Real
Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.Collection: Wise
A pear should come to the table popped with juice, Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.Collection: Autumn
Frogs eat Butterflies, Snakes eat Frogs, Hogs eat Snakes, Men eat Hogs.Collection: Nature
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrificeCollection: Coffee
In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be.Collection: Spring
The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book.Collection: Summer
You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without menaing.Collection: Moving
Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.Collection: God
Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.Collection: Beach
Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.Collection: Art
Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.Collection: World
Man is an eternal sophomore.Collection: Men