Frasi di Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens
Data di nascita: 2. Ottobre 1879
Data di morte: 2. Agosto 1955
Wallace Stevens è stato un poeta statunitense.
Frasi Wallace Stevens
„Il poeta guarda il mondo come un uomo guarda una donna.“
da Opus posthumous
„What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?“
— Wallace Stevens, libro Harmonium
"Sunday Morning"
Harmonium (1923)
„The world is ugly,
And the people are sad..“
— Wallace Stevens, libro Harmonium
"Gubbinal"
Harmonium (1923)
Contesto: p>That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.The world is ugly,
And the people are sad..</p
„Perhaps
The truth depends on a walk around a lake“
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Contesto: p>Perhaps
The truth depends on a walk around a lake,A composing as the body tires, a stop
To see hepatica, a stop to watch
A definition growing certain andA wait within that certainty, a rest
In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.
Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence</p
„These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.“
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Contesto: p>The difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that
Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason.</p
„I heard them cry — the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves“
— Wallace Stevens, libro Harmonium
"Domination of Black"
Harmonium (1923)
Contesto: 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?
„The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.“
The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Contesto: 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.
„To be young is all there is in the world.“
Letter to his future wife Elsie Moll Kachel (21 March 1907); as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 5
Contesto: 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.
