Wallace Stevens Poetry Quotations

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

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.

The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

At evening casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

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 possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.

Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.

Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.

Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance.

Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

You know that the nucleus of a time is not The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins Nor stand there making orotund consolations. He shares the confusions of intelligence.