“Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.Use dusky words and dusky images.Darken your speech.Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,Conceiving words,As the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence,And out of their droning sibilants makesA serenade.”

“(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.”

“(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious man turns to the idea of God.”

“A poem is a meteor.”

“After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.”

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

“Money is a kind of poetry.”

“A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”

“In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.”

“The imagination is man's power over nature.”

“To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.”