Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

1. Week 1 | January 22 • Adagia(900) • Voices and Visions Film: Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

2. Adagia • Happiness is an acquisition. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

3. Adagia • Each age is a pigeon-hole. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

4. Adagia • The poet makes silk dresses out of worms. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

5. Adagia • Authors are actors, books are theatres. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

6. Adagia • Life is an Affair of people and not of places. But for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

7. Adagia • Literature is the better part of life. To this it seems inevitably necessary to add, provided life is the better part of literature. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

8. Adagia • After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

9. Adagia • The collecting of poetry from one's experience as one goes along is not the same thing as merely writing poetry. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

10. Adagia • The imagination wishes to be indulged. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

11. Adagia • Poetry is not personal. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

12. Adagia • The real is only the base. But it is the base. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

13. Adagia • Weather is a sense of nature. Poetry is a sense. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

14. Adagia • All poetry is experimental poetry. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

15. Adagia • The individual partakes of the whole. Except in extraordinary cases he never adds to it. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

16. Adagia • It is the belief and not the god that counts. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

17. Adagia • The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

18. Adagia • Consider: I. That the whole world is material for poetry; II. That there is no specifically poetic material. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

19. Adagia • The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth of is to know that is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

20. Adagia • Wine and music are not good until afternoon. But poetry is like prayer in that it is most effective in solitude and in the times of solitude as, for example, in the earliest morning. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

21. Adagia • The exquisite environment of fact. The final poem will be the poem of fact in the language of fact. But it will be the poem of fact not realized before. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

22. Adagia • We live in the mind. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

23. Adagia • Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

24. Adagia • A poem should be part of one's sense of life. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

25. Adagia • Money is a kind of poetry. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

26. Adagia • It is not every day that the world arranges itself in a poem. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

27. Adagia • The death of one god is the death of all. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

28. Adagia • In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

29. Adagia • A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

30. Adagia • Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagined are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

31. Adagia • Realism is a corruption of reality. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

32. Adagia • I don't think we should insist that the poet is normal or, for that matter, that anybody is. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

33. Adagia • When one is young everything is physical; when one is old everything is psychic. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

34. Adagia • The tongue is an eye. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

35. Adagia • When the mind is like a hall in which thought is like a voice speaking, the voice is always that of someone else. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

36. Adagia • The body is the great poem. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

37. Adagia • The poet is the priest of the invisible. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

38. Adagia • In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

39. Adagia • Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

40. Adagia • The full flower of the actual, not the California fruit of the ideal. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

41. Adagia • Poetry is the gaiety (joy) of language. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

42. Adagia • The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

43. Adagia • Eventually an imaginary world is entirely without interest. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

44. Adagia • I have no life except in poetry. No doubt that would be true if my whole life as free for poetry. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

45. Adagia • There is a nature that absorbs the mixedness of metaphors. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

46. Adagia • Poetry is a health. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

47. Adagia • It is easier to copy than to think, hence fashion. Besides a community of originals is not a community. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

48. Adagia • There is nothing in the world greater than reality. In this predicament we have to accept reality itself as the only genius. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

49. Adagia • Poetry is (and should be) for the poet a source of pleasure and satisfaction, not a source of honors. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

50. Adagia • Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens