Agnostics

"The world is a force not a presence."

"Poetry is a search for the inexplicable."

"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."

"To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as having something to say."

"Man is an eternal sophomore."

"The poet is a god, or, the young poet is a god. The old poet is a tramp."

"The imagination is one of the forces of nature."

"The poet makes silk dresses out of worms."

"All history is modern history."

"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."

"Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life."

"A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite."

"Sentimentality is a failure of feeling."

"A poem should be a part of one's sense of life."

"The casual is not Enough. The freshness of transformation isThe freshness of a world. It is our own, It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves, And that necessity and that presentationAre rubbings of a glass in which we peer."

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

"A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman."

"Let’s see the very thing and nothing else. Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight. Burn everything not part of it to ash. Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky Without evasion by a single metaphor. Look at it in its essential barrenness And say this, this is the centre that I seek."

"Exile desire For what is not. This is the barrenness Of the fertile thing that can attain no more."

"Light the first light of evening, as in a room In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good."

"One of the limits of reality Presents itself in Oley when the hay, Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.… Things stop in that direction and since they stop The direction stops and we accept what is As good. The utmost must be good and is…"

"Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction."

"At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A bird's cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind."

"This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing"

"That scrawny cry — It was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun, Surrounded by its choral rings, Still far away. It was like A new knowledge of reality."

"The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos."

"The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination."

"The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us."

"What the poet has in mind . . . is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination. The poet tries to exemplify it, in part as I have tried to exemplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives."

"We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark. Out of this same light, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough."

"For the poet, the imagination is paramount, and . . . he dwells apart in his imagination, as the philosopher dwells in his reason, and as the priest dwells in his belief … The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things.""

"The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art... in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it."

"The paramount relation between poetry and painting today, between modern man and modern art, is simply this: that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince."

"Reality is the beginning not the end, Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega, Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals."

"There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel."

"It may be dismissed, on the one hand, as a commonplace aesthetic satisfaction: and, on the other hand, if we say that the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called, even if poetry that involves us vitally, the feeling of deliverance, of a release, of a perfection touched, of a vocation so that all men may know the truth and that the truth may set them free — if we say these things and if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplished its purpose, would have seemed, whether young or old, whether in rags or ceremonial robe, a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation. This may be a gross exaggeration of a very simple matter. But perhaps the same is true of many of the more prodigious things of life and death."

"It is not in the premise that reality Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses A dust, a force that traverses a shade."

"Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate."

"If there must be a god in the house, must be, Saying things in the room and on the stair,Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor, Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghostOr Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.He must be incapable of speaking, closed, As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;As color, even the closest to us, is; As shapes, though they portend us, are.It is the human that is the alien, The human that has no cousin in the moon.It is the human that demands his speech From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.If there must be a god in the house, let him be one That will not hear us when we speak: a coolnessA vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass Of which we are too distantly a part."

"The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have."

"After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption."

"The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that the reader leaned above the page, Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom The summer night is like a perfection of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: The access of perfection to the page. And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world, In which there is no other meaning, itself Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself Is the reader leaning late and reading there."

"The President ordains the bee to be Immortal. The President ordains."

"Of these beginnings, gay and green, propose The suitable amours. Time will write them down."

"A. A violent order is disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one."

"The bees came booming as if they had never gone, As if hyacinths had never gone. We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause In a universe of inconstancy. This meansNight-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraph Is satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts."

"Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf. This arrival in the wild country of the soul, All approaches gone, being completely there, Where the wild poem is a substitute For the woman one loves or ought to love, One wild rhapsody a fake for another.You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra Hums and you say "The world in a verse,A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains, Women invisible in music and motion and color," After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala."

"The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies."

"The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar's art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives — if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary . . . What light requires a day to do, and by day I mean a kind of Biblical revolution of time, the imagination does in the twinkling of an eye. It colors, increases, brings to a beginning and end, invents languages, crushes men, and, for that matter, gods in its hands, it says to women more than it is possible to say, it rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact..."

"My dame, sing for this person accurate songs."