Frasi di Wallace Stevens

pagina 6

“L'intolleranza nei confronti di un'altra religione è tolleranza in se stessa se paragonata all'intollerante rispetto dell'arte dell'altra gente.”

“Il poeta guarda il mondo come un uomo guarda una donna.”

“C'è vicenda di morte in paradiso?”

“Come la vita si sviluppa con terrore, anche la sua letteratura si sviluppa con terrore.”

“I filosofi dimostrano che i filosofi esistono. I poeti semplicemente si godono la vita.”

“L'immaginazione è il potere dell'uomo sulla natura.”

“La poesia è la suprema forma letteraria, madame.”

“Mistica madre di bellezza è morte,
nel cui tepido grembo intravediamo
le madri nostre in un'insonne attesa.”

“Niente può essere più inappropriato per la letteratura americana che la sua fonte inglese, finché gli americani non avranno la sensibilità degli inglesi.”

“Tutto è complicato; se non fosse così, la vita e la poesia e tutto il resto sarebbero una noia.”

“Un poema non necessita di un significato come la maggior parte delle cose nella natura.”

“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.”

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

“Slowly the ivy on the stones
Becomes the stones. Women become
The cities, children become the fields
And men in waves become the sea.”

“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.”

“They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture
Pleased that the irrational is rational,Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street,
I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.”

“Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead
At a table on which the food is cold?
Is my thought a memory, not alive?
Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?”

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

“The blue guitar
And I are one.”

“With six meats and twelve wines or else without
To walk another room…Monsieur and comrade,
The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines.”

“In solitude the trumpets of solitude
Are not of another solitude resounding;
A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.”

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

“Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips
Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.”

“Donna, donna, dark,
Stooping in indigo gown
And cloudy constellations,
Conceal yourself or disclose
Fewest things to the lover —
A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit,
A pungent bloom against your shade.”

“My dame, sing for this person accurate songs.”

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

“The sun, that brave man,
Comes through boughs that lie in wait,
That brave man.

Green and gloomy eyes
In dark forms of the grass
Run away.

The good stars,
Pale helms and spiky spurs,
Run away.

Fears of my bed,
Fears of life and fears of death,
Run away.

That brave man comes up
From below and walks without meditation,
That brave man.”

“The number of ways of passing between the traditional two fixed points of man’s life, that is to say, of passing from the self to God, is fixed only by the limitations of space, which is limitless. The eternal philosopher is the eternal pilgrim on that road. It is difficult to take him seriously when he relies on the evidence of the teeth, the throat and the bowels. Yet in the one poem that is unimpeachably divine, the poem of the ascent into heaven, it is possible to say that there can be no faults, since it is precisely the faults of life this poem enables us to leave behind. If the idea of God is the ultimate poetic idea, then the idea of the ascent into heaven is only a little below it.”

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

“It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect
The final elegance, not to console
Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.”

“That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.”

“The fluctuations of certainty, the change
Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.”

“Man is an eternal sophomore.”

“Place honey on the altars and die,
You lovers that are bitter at heart.”

“You remain the more than natural figure. You
Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrationalDistortion, however fragrant, however dear.
That’s it: the more than rational distortion,
The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that.”

“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.”

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

“I know that timid breathing. Where
Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentously declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.”

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

“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.”