It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flittering, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

— Wallace Stevens

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

— Wallace Stevens

It matters, because everything we say Of the past is description without place, a Castor the imagination, made in sound;And because what we say of the future must portend, Be alive with its own seeming, seeming to Belize rubies reddened by rubies reddening.

— Wallace Stevens

It was soldier's went marching over the rocks, and still they came in watery flocks, because it was spring and the birds had to come, No doubt that soldier's had to be marching, and that the drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling

— Wallace Stevens

Let be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

— Wallace Stevens

Money is a kind of poetry.

— Wallace Stevens

Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

— Wallace Stevens

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

— Wallace Stevens

One must read poetry with one's nerves.

— Wallace Stevens

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.

— Wallace Stevens