Faith & Spirit Quote by Wallace Stevens

Stevens is policing the border between costume and character, and he does it with the cool authority of someone who spent his days in an insurance office and his nights re-inventing the imagination. “Style is not something applied” isn’t a craft note so much as a philosophical warning: if your poem’s surface is doing all the work, the poem is already dead. Style, for Stevens, is not an accessory you paste on to persuade readers you’re serious; it’s the pressure system inside the work, the way meaning circulates through diction, rhythm, image, and temperament.

The line “It is something that permeates” carries the subtext of integrity. Not moral virtue, but structural honesty: a poem’s “manner” should be inseparable from what it perceives. That’s why he jumps scales so boldly - from “the poem” to “the manner of a god” to “the bearing of a man.” He’s claiming style is ontology, not decoration. A god doesn’t put on divinity; a person’s bearing is how they exist in space. Likewise, a poem’s style is its mode of being, not its outfit.

Context matters. Modernism was crowded with manifestos, poses, and the marketable shock of the new; Stevens is separating hard-won vision from mere novelty. “It is not a dress” lands as a dismissal of the literary equivalent of fashion week: impressive silhouettes with no body inside. His intent is clarifying and slightly austere: if style doesn’t permeate, it’s just drag.