One must read poetry with one's nerves. - Wallace Stevens
Poetry is the scholar's art. - Wallace Stevens
To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest. - Wallace Stevens
Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking. - Wallace Stevens
The way through the worldIs more difficult to find than the way beyond it. - Wallace Stevens
I know noble accentsAnd lucid, inescapable rhythms;But I know, too,That the blackbird is involvedIn what I know. - Wallace Stevens
There will never be an endTo this droning of the surf. - Wallace Stevens
Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential. - Wallace Stevens
A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order.These two things are one. - Wallace Stevens
Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of themoon.It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing hecould be told.It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know.It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak. - Wallace Stevens
The mind can never be satisfied. - Wallace Stevens
The summer night is like a perfection of thought. - Wallace Stevens
We live in an old chaos of the sun. - Wallace Stevens
I do not know which to prefer,The beauty of inflectionsOr the beauty of innuendosThe blackbird whistlingOr just after. - Wallace Stevens
After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends. - Wallace Stevens
For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. - Wallace Stevens
I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill. - Wallace Stevens
Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container. - Wallace Stevens
There is a perfect rout of characters in every man—and every man is like an actor’s trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things - Wallace Stevens
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. - Wallace Stevens
Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers. - Wallace Stevens
It was soldier's went marching over the rocks,and still they came in watery flocks,because it was spring and the birds had to come,No doubt that soldier's had to be marching,and that the drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling - Wallace Stevens
A poem is a meteor. - Wallace Stevens
Poetry is an abstraction bloodied. - Wallace Stevens