Frasi di Wallace Stevens

pagina 7

“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.”

“The wind in which the dead leaves blow.
Here I inhale profounder strength
And as I am, I speak and move
And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar.”

“Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and
To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is
An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.
But are these separate?”

“If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.”

“First one beam, then another, then
A thousand are radiant in the sky.
Each is both star and orb; and day
Is the riches of their atmosphere.”

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

“The death of one god is the death of all.”

“He tries by a peculiar speech to speak The peculiar potency of the general”

“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.”

“The President ordains the bee to be
Immortal. The President ordains.”

“To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on
The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart
That is the common, the bravest fundament, This is a facile exercise”

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

“Without a name and nothing to be desired,
If only imagined but imagined well.”

“Yet it depends on yours. The two are one.
They are a plural, a right and left, a pair,
Two parallels that meet if only in”

“Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.”

“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.”

“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.”

“A few things for themselves,
Florida, venereal soil,
Disclose to the lover.”

“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 blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her window
Did not desire that feathery argentines
Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them”

“The imagination is one of the forces of nature.”

“Be content —
Expansions, diffusions — content to be
The unspotted imbecile revery,
The heraldic center of the world
Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins,
The amorist Adjective aflame…”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“We reason of these things with later reason
And we make of what we see, what we see clearly
And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.”

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

“The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.”

“The President has apples on the table
And barefoot servants round him, who adjust
The curtains to a metaphysical "t"”

“My house has changed a little in the sun.
The fragrance of the magnolias come close,
False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.”