Date: December, 1917

"I was of three minds, / Like a tree / In which there are three blackbirds."

— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

Date: September 7, 1923

"It was caparison of mind and cloud / And something given to make whole among / The ruses that were shattered by the large."

— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

Date: 1941, 1942

"I think that his [the poet's] function is to make his imagination theirs and that he fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others."

— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

Date: 1942

"The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind, / If one may say so."

— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

Date: 1942

"The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice."

— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

Date: 1942

"It has to be on that stage / And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and / With meditation, speak words that in the ear, / In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, / Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound / Of which, an invisible audience listens, / Not to the play, but to itself, ex...

— Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)