It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.
Wallace Stevens, American Modernist poet (1879-1955), cited in David Madden, A primer of the novel, Scarecrow Press, 1980, p. 192.

(Source: amiquote)

The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.
Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Reality & the Imagination, 1951. Thank you, crow with no mouth.

The Snowman

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

—Wallace Stevens.

With thanks to Crow with No Mouth.

Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.
Wallace Stevens (via aperfectcommotion)

(Source: mythologyofblue)

When I was a boy I used to think that things progressed by contrasts, that there was a law of contrasts. But this was building the world out of blocks. Afterwards I came to think of the energizing that comes from mere interplay, interaction. Thus, the various faculties of the mind co-exist and interact, and there is as much delight in this mere co-existence as man and woman find in each other’s company … Cross reflections, modifications, counter-balances, complements, giving and taking are illimitable. They make things inter-dependent and their inter-dependence sustains them and gives them pleasure.
Wallace Stevens, 1940 Letter to Hi Simons, from Slow Muse and Such Stuff
The poet is the priest of the invisible.
Wallace Stevens (via couleurs & oceanofmind)
I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes & barrens & wilds. It still dwarfs & terrifies & crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens & orchards & fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.
Wallace Stevens, 1904 (via nevver)