Love Quote by Wallace Stevens

Stevens makes poetry sound less like craft and more like a total attachment style. The line refuses the cozy myth that poems are born from “inspiration” alone; he’s insisting on appetite, on commitment so intense it borders on obsession. “Must” is the tell: this isn’t a preference, it’s a standard. If you don’t love the raw materials - words as physical objects, ideas as intellectual pressure, images as sensory charge, rhythms as bodily tempo - you’re just arranging furniture.

The subtext is a quiet shot at poets who love only one piece of the machine. The image-people who disdain argument. The concept-people who treat language as a transparent delivery system. The formalists who worship rhythm but forget it’s meant to carry feeling, not replace it. Stevens lists the components like a manifesto, then binds them to a single demand: love them “with all your capacity,” meaning the full range of seriousness you’d bring to a person, a faith, a life. Poetry, for him, is not a hobby of taste; it’s a discipline of desire.

Context matters: Stevens spent his days as an insurance executive, writing some of the 20th century’s most luxuriously brainy poems after hours. That double life sharpened his sense that imagination isn’t airy escape but a rival mode of reality-making. Loving “words” and “rhythms” isn’t preciousness; it’s how you push back against a world that wants language to be purely functional. In Stevens’s modernism, the poem survives by being utterly, almost scandalously, alive to its own materials.