“The villages slept as the capable man went down,Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive,The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds,As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed,Impatient of the bells and midnight forms,Rode over the picket docks, rode down the road,And, capable, created in his mind,Eventual victor, out of the martyr's bones,The ultimate elegance: the imagined land.”

“(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.”