True poetry has no interest in improving or idealizing the world, which does well enough. It only wants to realize the world, to see it better.

--John Crowe Ransom


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

--Wallace Stevens


Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.

--Wallace Stevens


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

--Wallace Stevens


If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made out of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

--Wallace Stevens


Intolerance respecting other people’s religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people’s art.

--Wallace Stevens


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

--Wallace Stevens


The genuine artist is never “true to life.” He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

--Wallace Stevens


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

--Wallace Stevens