Wallace Stevens
Quotes
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.
The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.
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.
The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
What the poet has in mind ... is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination. The poet tries to exemplify it, in part as I have tried to exemplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives.
Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.
The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination.
The poet is a god, or, the young poet is a god. The old poet is a tramp.
Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.
The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.
