Poetry Is a Destructive Force

Wallace Stevens

 
That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.
It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.
Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.
He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own . . .
The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.
 
From The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed in 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Poems by This Author

Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
Bantams in Pine-Woods by Wallace Stevens
Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock by Wallace Stevens
The houses are haunted
Earthy Anecdote by Wallace Stevens
Every time the bucks went clattering
Fabliau of Florida by Wallace Stevens
Barque of phosphor
Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour by Wallace Stevens
Light the first ligh of evening, as in a room
Le Monocle de Mon Oncle by Wallace Stevens
Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds
Lunar Paraphrase by Wallace Stevens
The moon is the mother of pathos and pity
Man Carrying Thing by Wallace Stevens
The poem must resist the intelligence
Metaphors of a Magnifico by Wallace Stevens
Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Nomad Exquisite by Wallace Stevens
As the immense dew of Florida
Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself by Wallace Stevens
At the earliest ending of winter
Of the Surface of Things by Wallace Stevens
In my room, the world is beyond my understanding
Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Tea at the Palaz of Hoon by Wallace Stevens
Not less because in purple I descended
The Emperor of Ice-Cream by Wallace Stevens
Call the roller of big cigars,
The High-Toned Old Christian Woman by Wallace Stevens
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
The Idea of Order at Key West by Wallace Stevens
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage by Wallace Stevens
But not on a shell, she starts
The Plain Sense of Things by Wallace Stevens
After the leaves have fallen, we return
The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
Among twenty snowy mountains,
To the Roaring Wind by Wallace Stevens
What syllable are you seeking