Wallace Stevens Quotes

Poetry is the essence of everything, and it’s through deep contact with reality and living fully that you reach poetry. Very often I see photographers cultivating the strangeness or awkwardness of a scene, thinking it is poetry. No. Poetry is two elements which are suddenly conflict — a spark between two elements. But it’s given very seldom, and you can’t look for it. It’s like if you look for inspiration. No, it just comes by enriching yourself and living.

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

Shakespeare drew a map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens. Wht is one considered science and the other fir only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and drury lane?

My paintings are reflections of my own inner mysteries... they all reflect my relationship to my steadiest of companions and muses - nature and animals.

We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.

How poetic you are," she said. "I've a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.

Poetry isn't an activity, it's a way life is lived.

A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental; they necessarily are reflected in his theology.

Poetry and music are the best at the highest level of the human mind. Out of poetry, out of their need for poetry, human beings have developed the idea of God. And so when we sing, when we dance, when we speak poetry we are speaking out of God's mouth, each other out of the music from God's heart.

The heaven of poetry and romance still lies around us and within us.

The belief in poetry is a magnificent fury, or it is nothing.

Nature is God's. Art is man's instrument.

A lot of poems seem, in some sense, to pull the outside world into the interior. They aren't perhaps emotion recollected in tranquillity but perception recollected in interiority.

After writing all day I go for a walk and see a piece of architecture i want to photograph and i have to take a picture and later a poem comes in my mind.

Poetry never loses its appeal. Sometimes its audience wanes and sometimes it swells like a wave. But the essential mystery of being human is always going to engage and compel us. We're involved in a mystery. Poetry uses words to put us in touch with that mystery. We're always going to need it.

Listen to some good poetry. You see? It keeps us from thinking we are only what our blatant appetites describe us as.

All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself.

Human life without some form of poetry is not human life but animal existence.

Only a lunatic would think that art is superior to nature.

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

I would keep in mind to a young poet that you are entering into something that is very important, that has always been important in terms of human concerns.

Poetry has an indirect way of hinting at things. Poetry is feminine. Prose is masculine. Prose, the very structure of it, is logical; poetry is basically illogical. Prose has to be clear-cut; poetry has to be vague - that's its beauty, its quality. Prose simply says what it says; poetry says many things. Prose is needed in the day-to-day world, in the marketplace. But whenever something of the heart has to be said, prose is always found inadequate - one has to fall back to poetry.

True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.