Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

I It must be abstract. It must change. It must give pleasure.

II The most beautiful thing In the world is the world. How beautiful, how wonderful… The past is a bright tree.

III Nature is a thought. Nature is what remains of places After people are no more.

IV A poem is the voice of the heart, The heart; alone alone; the very earth is the earth and it leads you.

V The poem is a friend, With nobility in its cadence, It has the grandeur of the land.

• Wallace Stevens