Wallace Stevens

Poet. A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough...

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others.

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

There will never be an end to this droning of the surf.

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

It was her voice that made/ the sky acutest at its vanishing./ She measured to the hour its solitude./

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

She was the single artificer of the world/ in which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,/ whatever self it had, became the self/

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

that was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,/ as we beheld her striding there alone,/

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

knew that there never was a world for her/ except the one she sang and, singing, made.

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

the meaningless plungings of water and the wind

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

For the listener, who listens in the snow,/ and, nothing himself, beholds/
nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office.

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

Children picking up our bones/ will never know that these were once/ as quick as foxes on the hill...

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

After the leaves have fallen, we return/ to a plain sense of things.

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

It is as if/ we had come to an end of the imagination,/ inanimate in an inert savoir.

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else.

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

[Wallace Stevens @wallacestevens_]

I am what is around me.