S.M. Stevens Quotes
The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father, Because, in chief, it, only, can defend Against itself. At its mercy, we depend Upon it.
The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
On a few words of what is real in the world I nourish myself. I defend myself against Whatever remains.
The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind.
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.
Unless we believe in the hero, what is there To believe? Incisive what, the fellow Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud.
This mangled, smutted semi-world hacked out Of dirt . . . It is not possible for the moon To blot this with its dove-winged blendings.
Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night, How is it I find you in difference, see you there In a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.
People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow & they would if poets wrote it.
One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls, When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops. He mocks the guinea, challenges The crow, inciting various modes. The sparrow requites one, without intent.
For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
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.
To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest.
I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.
Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through. Have liberty not as the air within a grave Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native, In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate.
The thinker as reader reads what has been written. He wears the words he reads to look upon Within his being.
In a world of universal poverty The philosophers alone will be fat Against the autumn winds In an autumn that will be perpetual.
The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die The broken cartwheel on the hill.
There's no such thing as life; or if there is, It is faster than the weather, faster than Any character. It is more than any scene: Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.
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.
A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.
Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me, life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.
Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music.
The subject matter... is not that collection of solid, static objects extended in space but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes.
It may be that the ignorant man, alone, Has any chance to mate his life with life That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.
Thus the theory of description matters most. It is the theory of the word for those For whom the word is the making of the world, The buzzing world and lisping firmament.
Of what is real I say, Is it the old, the roseate parent or The bride come jingling, kissed and cupped, or else The spirit and all ensigns of the self?
The grackles sing avant the spring Most spiss oh! Yes, most spissantly. They sing right puissantly.
How cold the vacancy When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist First sees reality. The mortal no Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.
The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world.
After a lustre of the moon, we say We have not the need of any paradise, We have not the need of any seducing hymn.
The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
Day after day, throughout the winter, We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason In a world of wind and frost.
The winter is made and you have to bear it, The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind, For all the thoughts of summer that go with it In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags.