A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.
Wallace Stevens

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

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.
Wallace Stevens

After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.
Wallace Stevens

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.
Wallace Stevens

Death is the mother of Beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.
Wallace Stevens

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
Wallace Stevens

I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
Wallace Stevens

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.
Wallace Stevens


If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.
Wallace Stevens

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Wallace Stevens

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.
Wallace Stevens

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
Wallace Stevens

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
Wallace Stevens

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.
Wallace Stevens

Money is a kind of poetry.
Wallace Stevens

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.
Wallace Stevens

New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.
Wallace Stevens

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
Wallace Stevens