388 Quotes by Wallace Stevens

The way through the worldIs more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order.These two things are one.

Poetry is the scholar's art.

The villages slept as the capable man went down,Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive,The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds,As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed,Impatient of the bells and midnight forms,Rode over the picket docks, rode down the road,And, capable, created in his mind,Eventual victor, out of the martyr's bones,The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.

A poem is a meteor.

There will never be an endTo this droning of the surf.

I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

The statement that the process does not involve the poet as subject, to the extent to which that is true, precludes direct egotism. On the other hand, without indirect egotism there can be no poetry. There can be no poetry without the personality of the poet, and that, quite simply, is why the definition of poetry has not been found and why, in short, there is none.