Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace StevensRead
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections, Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling, Or just after.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a deep appreciation for the beauty found in language and nature.
Wallace Stevens reflects on the nuanced beauty that can be found in both the subtleties of language and the sounds of nature. He contrasts the beautiful variations in speech and poetic expression, represented by 'inflections' and 'innuendoes', with the simple yet profound beauty of a blackbird's song, capturing the duality of appreciation for both aesthetic language and natural beauty.
In practice
This quote can inspire artists during a gallery opening to discuss the interplay of language and nature.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
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Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
The poignancy of a photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred
What I am interested in now is the landscape. Pictures without people. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually there are no people in my pictures. It is so emotional.
Once something is memorable, it's living and you're using it. That to me is the foundation of a creative society.
Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.
Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people-even imaginary ones-do not live in vacuums... From Twilight to Romeo and Juliet to The Little Mermaid, no work of the imagination is truly apolitical, because the world and our hopes for it are always part of our stories.
I wrote poetry from the time I could write. That was the only way I could begin to express who I was but the poems didn't make sense to my teachers. They didn't rhyme. They were about the wind sounds, the planets' motions, never about who I was or how I felt. I didn't think I felt anything. I was this mind more than a body or a heart. My mind photographing the stars, hearing the wind.
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