Life & Wisdom Quote by Wallace Stevens

Stevens’s line is a polite stick of dynamite tossed into the seminar room. “Perhaps” pretends to soften the blow, but the sentence is built to antagonize: value isn’t located in agreement, clarity, or system-building, but in the productive irritation of people whose job is to systematize. He’s not taking an anti-intellectual victory lap. He’s drawing a boundary around poetry’s jurisdiction.

Philosophers, in Stevens’s framing, are the custodians of coherence. They want meanings that can be carried from mind to mind without loss. Stevens’s poet wants the opposite risk: language that won’t sit still, that refuses to be flattened into a thesis. To “go along with them” is to let poetry become an illustration for an already decided worldview. To infuriate them is to keep the imagination sovereign, to force thought to confront what it can’t fully domesticate.

The subtext is also self-defense. Modernist poets were constantly asked to justify difficulty, ambiguity, and lush abstraction as if these were moral failings. Stevens flips the tribunal: if philosophers are annoyed, maybe the poem is doing its real work. Infuriation becomes an aesthetic metric, a sign that the poem has preserved the strangeness of experience rather than laundering it into concepts.

Context matters: Stevens wrote in an era when philosophy (pragmatism, positivism, the growing authority of “analysis”) competed with art for cultural seriousness. The quip asserts that poetry doesn’t win by mimicking philosophy’s methods. It wins by making philosophy feel, briefly and uncomfortably, inadequate.