Stevens Inquiry

Famous quotes containing the words stevens and/or inquiry:

    We stand in the tumult of a festival.
    What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?
    These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?
    These musicians dubbing at a tragedy,
    A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this:
    That there are no lines to speak? There is no play.
    —Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis,—is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There and Then, and introduce in its place the Here and Now.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)