Wallace Stevens

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.

All history is modern history.

The paramount relation between poetry and painting today, between modern man and modern art, is simply this: that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince.

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.

The humble are they that move about the world with the lure of the real in their hearts.

The world is a force, not a presence.

There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel.

The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar's art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives — if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary ... What light requires a day to do, and by day I mean a kind of Biblical revolution of time, the imagination does in the twinkling of an eye. It colors, increases, brings to a beginning and end, invents languages, crushes men, and, for that matter, gods in its hands, it says to women more than it is possible to say, it rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact.

The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art... in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it.

For the poet, the imagination is paramount, and ... he dwells apart in his imagination, as the philosopher dwells in his reason, and as the priest dwells in his belief … The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things."

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.