« All Poetry Quotes · Wallace Stevens's Page
Poetry Quotes by Wallace Stevens
- After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
- Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.
- The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.
- Poetry is a means of redemption.
- The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.
- Money is a kind of poetry.
- All poetry is experimental poetry.
- Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world
- Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are…
- 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…
- A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
- Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
- In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
- If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival…
- Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water,…
- Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.
- Poetry is the scholar's art.
- The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
- One must read poetry with one's nerves.
- People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it.
- The poet is the priest of the invisible.
- It is easy to suppose that few people realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky…
More Poetry Quotes
- Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. — Aristotle
- Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals,… — Aristotle
- I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come… — Paul Auster
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets.… — Paul Auster
- If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem. — M H Abrams
- Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things. — Matthew Arnold
- I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places. — John Ashbery
- But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me… — Chinua Achebe
- I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases… — Margaret Atwood
- The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is… — Margaret Atwood
- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. — Wystan Hugh Auden