Poets From The United States

"Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, Into twenty villages, Or one man Crossing a single bridge into a village."

"My candle burned alone in an immense valley. Beams of the huge night converged upon it, Until the wind blew. Then beams of the huge night Converged upon its image, Until the wind blew."

"I saw how the night came, Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks. I felt afraid. And I remembered the cry of the peacocks."

"I heard them cry — the peacocks. Was it a cry against the twilight Or against the leaves themselves Turning in the wind, Turning as the flames Turned in the fire, Turning as the tails of the peacocks Turned in the loud fire, Loud as the hemlocks Full of the cry of the peacocks? Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?"

"Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left only Death's ironic scraping. Now, in its immortality, it plays On the clear viol of her memory, And makes a constant sacrament of praise."

"Beauty is momentary in the mind — The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing. So gardens die, their meek breath scenting The cowl of winter, done repenting. So maidens die, to the auroral Celebration of a maiden's choral."

"A breath upon her hand Muted the night. She turned — A cymbal crashed, Amid roaring horns."

"She walked upon the grass, Still quavering. The winds were like her maids, On timid feet, Fetching her woven scarves, Yet wavering."

"Upon the bank, she stood In the cool Of spent emotions. She felt, among the leaves, The dew Of old devotions."

"In the green water, clear and warm, Susanna lay. She searched The touch of springs, And found Concealed imaginings. She sighed, For so much melody."

"Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the self-same sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound; And thus it is that what I feel, Here in this room, desiring you, Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, Is music."

"The dress of a woman of Lhassa, in its place is an invisible element of that place made visible."

"There are men of the East, he said, who are the East. There are men of a province who are that province. There are men of a valley who are that valley."

"The soul, he said, is composed Of the external world."

"It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee."

"I placed a jar in Tennessee And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose upon it, And sprawled around, no longer wild."

"Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words."

"I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite."

"Success as a result of industry is a peasant ideal."

"Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress."

"I am one of you and being one of you Is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary angel of earth, Since, in my sight, you see the earth again, Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings, Like watery words awash; like meanings said By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not, Myself, only half a figure of a sort, A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man Of the mind, an apparition appareled in Apparels of such lightest look that a turn Of my shoulders and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?"

"I am the angel of reality, Seen for a moment standing in the door."

"One might have thought of sight, but who could think Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees? Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound, But the dark italics it could not propound. And out of what sees and hears and out Of what one feels, who could have thought to make So many selves, so many sensuous worlds, As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming With the metaphysical changes that occur, Merely in living as and where we live."

"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."

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

"Let wise men piece the world together with wisdom Or poets with holy magic. Hey-di-ho."

"This will make widows wince. But fictive things Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince."

"We agree in principle. That's clear. But take The opposing law and make a peristyle, And from the peristyle project a masque Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness, Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, Is equally converted into palms, Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm, Madame, we are where we began."

"Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms, Like windy citherns hankering for hymns."

"The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening."

"Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood."

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

"To be young is all there is in the world. The rest is nonsense — and cant. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it’s all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing.... Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds."

"In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American — on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion."

"Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!"

"A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light."

"One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits."

"Stevens is a poet who argues that life is what one makes of it within the limitations of one's own sensibility."

"Mr. Stevens is the master of a style: that is the most remarkable thing about him. His gift for combining words is baffling and fantastic but sure: even when you do not know what he is saying, you know that he is saying it well."

"Stevens' way of informing us comes in language and imagery so radically different from previous times that it is difficult to recognize exactly what he means. But throughout his poetry he speaks, like the mystics, primarily of the nature of our relationship with the universe. He continually circles back to the idea that we actively participate in what the world looks like and what it means. Although cast in modern terms, this idea is profoundly spiritual and moral. Since he gives no evidence of any direct visionary experience, it's not possible to say Stevens is a "mystic" or a "contemplative" poet. But he is a major figure in modern poetry because he synthesizes the concerns of the modern world — the emphasis on the human self as maker of meaning, the emphasis on scientific rationality, the emphasis on creating new forms to replace outmoded beliefs — with the perennial concerns of the human spirit. To find meaning, or the good — or by implication, God — we need to radically adjust our conception of reality. This takes powerful acts of individual imagination, and the possibilities are immense... Contrary to all appearances, to the difficulty of his verse, and to the preoccupied, distracted interpretations of contemporary critics, Wallace Stevens' poetry is a profoundly spiritual force. Anyone interested in the spiritual problems of modern humans must reckon with it."

"At the heart of many of Stevens's poems are harsh and unpalatable experiences revealed only gradually through his intense stylization."

"Blessings, Stevens; I stand with my back to grammar At an altar you never aspired to, celebrating the sacrament of the imagination whose high-priest notwithstanding you are."

"I turn now not to the Bible but to Wallace Stevens"

"A more attractive attitude of defense was disclosed at a café. In one corner, a man was playing a guitar, and the stranger turned to watch him. The guitar player was good; the stop and tremble of the strings touched everyone in that room. "You know," said the stranger, "I respect creative people, any kind; I never used to feel that way, but something happened-I know a man in the city I come from, a business associate (I'm a lawyer)-we've gone on fishing trips for twenty years I know him fairly well, I'd say-big man, too: six foot four, weighs two hundred and forty pounds. Twenty years, and I just found out last month that he writes poems. I asked around; he's written books of them; very good, too, they say. I'm going to get ahold of some. But I sure feel different about creative people." "What is the name of your friend?" "Wallace Stevens," said the stranger."

"Over many years (I am almost 72) so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me—it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry. Some poets—like Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, Randall Jarrell, Jean Valentine, Audre Lorde, Hayden Carruth, Jane Cooper, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, Clayton Eshelman—have been my friends, we’ve been comrades in exchanging work and encouraging each other… But I’ve also been powerfully affected by Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Muriel Rukeyser, Aimé Césaire, Robert Duncan—poets I met briefly if at all."

"Post-religious man, as Stevens saw him, still had a deep need for the kind of exaltation of the body and spirit which goes under different names in different religions — Christians call it grace, that is, the feeling or knowledge that the workings of God are revealed to the individual, thus lifting him or her up to a state of ecstatic consciousness. … For the romantics in general such moments of ecstasis in the midst of nature are experienced by the solitary imagination, and the bonds of society are cast away as unimportant. Stevens once said that the romantic is a falsification, and perhaps the reason for the comment was his feeling that such moments of ecstatic relation in the midst of nature had to be given a social and eventually political meaning, rather than remaining in the arena of the spirit. Stevens poetry then offers a pastoral romantic ecstasis that become the occasions for searching out the relations between the individual, his or her community and the natural world."

"Poetry is a search for the inexplicable."

"The world is a force not a presence."

"God is in me or else is not at all (does not exist)."

"To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems."