more Stevens quotes (from Adagia)
Aug. 11th, 2003 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
novapsycheWisdom asks nothing more.
A poem is a meteor.
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
Poetry is not personal.
The earth is not a building but a body.
The poet must come at least as the miraculous beast and, at his best, as the miraculous man.
Life cannot be based on a thesis, since, by nature, it is based on instinct. A thesis, however, is usually present and living is the struggle between thesis and instinct.
Weather is a sense of nature. Poetry is a sense.
There are two opposites: the poetry of rhetoric and the poetry of experience.
The bare image and the image as a symbol are the contrast: the image without meaning and the image as meaning. When the image is used to suggest something else, it is secondary. Poetry, as an imaginative thing, consists of more than lies on the surface.
One has a sensibility range beyond which nothing really exists for one. And in each this is different.
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
The individual partakes of the whole. Except in extraordinary cases he never adds to it.
What we see in the mind is as real to us as what we see with the eye.
The mind is the most powerful thing in the world.
There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.
Poetry is not a personal matter.
Poetry is a means of redemption.
Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
The imagination is the romantic.
Poetry is not the same thing as the imagination taken alone. Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelations or interactions.
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
Wine and music are not good until afternoon. But poetry is like prayer in that it is most effective in solitude and in the times of solitude as, for example, in the earliest morning.
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is tolerance itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
The great objective is the truth not only of the poem but of poetry.
That part of the truth of the world that has its origins in feeling.
Poetry is the expression of the experience of poetry.
The ideal is the actual become anaemic. The romantic is pretty much the same thing.
As the reason destroys, the poet must create.
The exquisite environment of fact. The final poem will be the poem of fact in the language of fact. But it will be the poem of fact not realized before.
We live in the mind.
It is the explanation of things that we make to ourselves that discloses our character.
The subjects of one's poems are the symbols of one's self or of one of one's selves.
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
A poem should be part of one's sense of life.
There is no difference between god and his temple.
Money is a kind of poetry.
In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
Everything tends to become real; or everything moves in the direction of reality.
The thing said must be the poem not the language used in the poem. At its best the poem consists of both elements.
The poet looks at the world somewhat as a man looks at a woman.
To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as to have something to say.
Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagined are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
The ultimate value is reality.
Realism is a corruption of reality.
The thing seen becomes the thing unseen. The opposite is, or seems to be, impossible.
The tongue is an eye.
God is a symbol for something that can as well take other forms, as, for example, the form of high poetry.
The great conquest is the conquest of reality. It is not to present life, for a moment, as it might have been.
Reality is a vacuum.
Poetry is metaphor.
The word must be the thing it represents otherwise it is a symbol. It is a question of identity.
When the mind is like a hall in which the thought is like a voice speaking, the voice is always that of someone else.
It is necessary to propose an enigma to the mind. The mind always proposes a solution.
The body is the great poem.
A poem is a meteor.
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
Poetry is not personal.
The earth is not a building but a body.
The poet must come at least as the miraculous beast and, at his best, as the miraculous man.
Life cannot be based on a thesis, since, by nature, it is based on instinct. A thesis, however, is usually present and living is the struggle between thesis and instinct.
Weather is a sense of nature. Poetry is a sense.
There are two opposites: the poetry of rhetoric and the poetry of experience.
The bare image and the image as a symbol are the contrast: the image without meaning and the image as meaning. When the image is used to suggest something else, it is secondary. Poetry, as an imaginative thing, consists of more than lies on the surface.
One has a sensibility range beyond which nothing really exists for one. And in each this is different.
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
The individual partakes of the whole. Except in extraordinary cases he never adds to it.
What we see in the mind is as real to us as what we see with the eye.
The mind is the most powerful thing in the world.
There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.
Poetry is not a personal matter.
Poetry is a means of redemption.
Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
The imagination is the romantic.
Poetry is not the same thing as the imagination taken alone. Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelations or interactions.
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
Wine and music are not good until afternoon. But poetry is like prayer in that it is most effective in solitude and in the times of solitude as, for example, in the earliest morning.
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is tolerance itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
The great objective is the truth not only of the poem but of poetry.
That part of the truth of the world that has its origins in feeling.
Poetry is the expression of the experience of poetry.
The ideal is the actual become anaemic. The romantic is pretty much the same thing.
As the reason destroys, the poet must create.
The exquisite environment of fact. The final poem will be the poem of fact in the language of fact. But it will be the poem of fact not realized before.
We live in the mind.
It is the explanation of things that we make to ourselves that discloses our character.
The subjects of one's poems are the symbols of one's self or of one of one's selves.
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
A poem should be part of one's sense of life.
There is no difference between god and his temple.
Money is a kind of poetry.
In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
Everything tends to become real; or everything moves in the direction of reality.
The thing said must be the poem not the language used in the poem. At its best the poem consists of both elements.
The poet looks at the world somewhat as a man looks at a woman.
To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as to have something to say.
Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagined are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
The ultimate value is reality.
Realism is a corruption of reality.
The thing seen becomes the thing unseen. The opposite is, or seems to be, impossible.
The tongue is an eye.
God is a symbol for something that can as well take other forms, as, for example, the form of high poetry.
The great conquest is the conquest of reality. It is not to present life, for a moment, as it might have been.
Reality is a vacuum.
Poetry is metaphor.
The word must be the thing it represents otherwise it is a symbol. It is a question of identity.
When the mind is like a hall in which the thought is like a voice speaking, the voice is always that of someone else.
It is necessary to propose an enigma to the mind. The mind always proposes a solution.
The body is the great poem.