Wallace Stevens’ poems are deeply philosophical, musical, and imaginative, blending reality with the power of the human mind. He often explored how imagination shapes the world, suggesting that beauty and meaning come not from external reality alone but from the mind’s ability to interpret it. His poems feel like meditations—quiet, layered, and full of striking images.
A recurring theme in Stevens’ work is the search for meaning in a world without fixed certainties. In poems like “The Snow Man” or “Sunday Morning,” he questions traditional beliefs and instead celebrates the richness of human perception. Nature appears again and again in his writing—not as a simple backdrop but as a field where the mind creates its own truths. His language is precise yet luxurious, filled with colors, sounds, and unexpected metaphors that invite the reader to look deeper.
Stevens also loved paradox: the tension between imagination and reality, chaos and order, emptiness and fullness. His poetry asks readers to rethink what is “real” and to appreciate the creative power of thought. Ultimately, Wallace Stevens’ poems stand out for their elegance, intellectual depth, and ability to transform everyday scenes into profound reflections on existence and art.
A Clear Day And No Memories
No soldiers in the scenery,
No thoughts of people now dead,
As they were fifty years ago,
Young and living in a live air,
Young and walking in the sunshine,
Bending in blue dresses to touch something,
Today the mind is not part of the weather.
Today the air is clear of everything.
It has no knowledge except of nothingness
And it flows over us without meanings,
As if none of us had ever been here before
And are not now: in this shallow spectacle,
This invisible activity, this sense.
Anecdote Of Canna
Huge are the canna in the dreams of
X, the mighty thought, the mighty man.
They fill the terrace of his capitol.
His thought sleeps not. Yet thought that wakes
In sleep may never meet another thought
Or thing... Now day-break comes...
X promenades the dewy stones,
Observes the canna with a clinging eye,
Observes and then continues to observe.
Anecdote of the Jar
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Gray Room
Although you sit in a room that is gray,
Except for the silver
Of the straw-paper,
And pick
At your pale white gown;
Or lift one of the green beads
Of your necklace,
To let it fall;
Or gaze at your green fan
Printed with the red branches of a red willow;
Or, with one finger,
Move the leaf in the bowl—
The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia
Beside you…
What is all this?
I know how furiously your heart is beating.
Gubbinal
That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
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.
Oak Leaves are Hands
In Hydaspia, by Howzen
Lived a lady, Lady Lowzen,
For whom what is was other things.
Flora she was once. She was florid
A bachelor of feen masquerie,
Evasive and metamorphorid.
Mac Mort she had been, ago,
Twelve-legged in her ancestral hells,
Weaving and weaving many arms.
Even now, the centre of something else,
Merely by putting hand to brow,
Brooding on centuries like shells.
As the acorn broods on former oaks
In memorials of Northern sound,
Skims the real for its unreal,
So she in Hydaspia created
Out of the movement of few words,
Flora Lowzen invigorated
Archaic and future happenings,
In glittering seven-colored changes,
By Howzen, the chromatic Lowzen.
Poem Written at Morning
A sunny day's complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.
By metaphor you paint
A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,
A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,
To be served by men of ice.
The senses paint
By metaphor. The juice was fragranter
Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears
Dripping a morning sap.
The truth must be
That you do not see, you experience, you feel,
That the buxom eye brings merely its element
To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced
Upward.
Green were the curls upon that head.
