wallace stevens

For Stevens, the world we invent in our heads, or in an artwork, has as much reality as the physical world if not more. In "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," it's like he's doing a Cubist portrait. He likes to pile up a variety of perspectives, the sum of which gets us closer to the truth than one fixed objective reality can.

The best Stevens poem by far is The Idea of Order at Key West. All the big Stevensian ideas are there. In it, art is about creating another reality. The actual world is almost reduced to fodder for the making of art:

"She was the maker of the song she sang
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing....

And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made...."

Also, humans are always trying to make order out of randomness, and this is an act of creation:

"Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea...
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night...."

That's the "blessed rage for order": when we look at a collection of lights and impose imagined patterns and designs on them, we're creators. "Anecdote of the Jar" has a similar subject: the poet's attention being centered on something makes the world centered on that thing, even if it's only temporarily and even if it's only so from his perspecting.

The temporary and the local and the trivial are constantly being exalted in Stevens's worldview; indeed some things are treasured precisely because they're temporary. That's what he means when he says "the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream."

I think.

He's often described as a poet of the imagination, and much of his poetry explores the relationship between the imagination and reality. He famously composed his poems on his way to and from work in the insurance industry. His poetry was a side job, an escape from his work (but a grounded escape--philosophical but not fantastic), a search for good things in the world and in life (usually the tempory, the local, and the trivial as the Mad Puffin mentioned) through the work of the mind.

"The Snow Man" is commonly anthologized and a fairly accessible place to start. By all means read "The Idea of Order at Key West" and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." "The House was Quiet and the World was Calm" is another one of my favorites and might ease you into his mindset.

Here's a link to Ronald Sukenick's Guide to the Collected Poetry, which is available in PDFs on the site. It includes explications of a number of Stevens's major poems.

(U+K line from "The Snow Man" - "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is")

This is nicely put. The effect of the blurriness as you reconsider with each section morphing into very sharp relief. One of my favorite poems.

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Wallace Stevens

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

i was forced to find meanings for it in a theory course once.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QinUdniUXIk

At the moment my favourite poem by WS is 'Domination in Black' - about the hemlocks, and the cry of the peacocks.

My favorite poet. He keeps me alive.

The Dove in Spring

Brooder, brooder, deep beneath its walls–
A small howling of the dove
Makes something of the little there,

The little and the dark, and that
In which it is and that in which
It is established. There the dove

Makes this small howling, like a thought
That howls in the mind or like a man
Who keeps seeking out his identity

In that which is and is established…It howls
Of the great sizes of an outer bush
And the great misery of the doubt of it,

Of stripes of silver that are strips
Like slits across a space, a place
And state of being large and light.

There is this bubbling before the sun,
This howling at one’s ear, too far
For daylight and too near for sleep.

it's only in the past year that I've begun to explore beyond the anthology pieces ("Blackbird", "Anecdote of the Jar", "Key West") & I would hardly call myself knowledgeable, but "Esthetique du Mal" was a sort of wallace stevens rosetta stone (skeleton key??) for me—even if you don't care for long poems, it's not as linear or as narrative as some of his others ("Comedian as the Letter C" comes to mind), just a loosely-connected suite of 15 poems on the subject of pain, but it gives one some idea of 'the total Stevens'

('total Stevens' meaning the scope of his concern, his many voices, his view of the human condition and of the place of his art therein)

*for a shorter version of the same poem, see "A Postcard From the Volcano"

ah what the heck

A Postcard From The Volcano

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is ... Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

I don't think I'm wrong to be reminded of Valery's "Le cimetiere marin" by final lines, tho I may be wrong to see a pun in stanza 2

"Esthetique du Mal" is a bit of a mess -- it doesn't cohere unless you've read enough Stevens to get what he's aiming for -- it's a good start.

can't believe I've been reading him for 2 years and I *just* realized what's going on in (the beginning stanzas of) 'Sunday Morning'

No results found for "wallace stevens is the robert frost of poetry"

craziness:

http://wkarrer.webs.com/wallacestevens.htm

https://goo.gl/photos/MJN5jWbatR6cPS5u5

I found this at the kinda rundown place I'm staying at, and despite feeling like I'm prob missing a lot (he seems v opaque a lot of the time, not that that's bad) I'm most of the way through Harmonium and enjoying it a lot. Mad Puffin's post kinda jibes w what I'm picking up so far

Photo's being weird, trying again:
https://goo.gl/photos/kYQkSKb2VTTqq8Yc8

Much of Harmonium approximates music -- rhyme and image for its own sake.

I'm definitely getting that, it's often gorgeous on that level. Kinda addictive, actually.

Harmonium is one of those books I appreciated mostly on the level of sound for the first couple of years I read it, starting in high school. Kenner's phrase for Stevens's poetry, "an Edward Lear poetic pushed to all limits," seems pretty accurate if you don't accept its pejorative undertones.

I love the clutch of sonorous, slightly melancholy Stevens recordings at PennSound: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Stevens-Wallace.html

The Poems of Our Climate

I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations - one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

<3
maybe my favorite poet

I'm reading Paul Mariani's new bio.

An excuse to share one of my favorites:

I
Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore,
The snake has left its skin upon the floor.
Key West sank downward under massive clouds
And silvers and greens spread over the sea. The moon
Is at the mast-head and the past is dead.
Her mind will never speak to me again.
I am free. High above the mast the moon
Rides clear of her mind and the waves make a refrain
Of this: that the snake has shed its skin upon
The floor. Go on through the darkness. The waves fly back

II
Her mind had bound me round. The palms were hot
As if I lived in ashen ground, as if
The leaves in which the wind kept up its sound
From my North of cold whistled in a sepulchral South,
Her South of pine and coral and coraline sea,
Her home, not mine, in the ever-freshened Keys,
Her days, her oceanic nights, calling
For music, for whisperings from the reefs.
How content I shall be in the North to which I sail
And to feel sure and to forget the bleaching sand ...

III
I hated the weathery yawl from which the pools
Disclosed the sea floor and the wilderness
Of waving weeds. I hated the vivid blooms
Curled over the shadowless hut, the rust and bones,
The trees likes bones and the leaves half sand, half sun.
To stand here on the deck in the dark and say
Farewell and to know that that land is forever gone
And that she will not follow in any word
Or look, nor ever again in thought, except
That I loved her once ... Farewell. Go on, high ship.

IV
My North is leafless and lies in a wintry slime
Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds.
The men are moving as the water moves,
This darkened water cloven by sullen swells
Against your sides, then shoving and slithering,
The darkness shattered, turbulent with foam.
To be free again, to return to the violent mind
That is their mind, these men, and that will bind
Me round, carry me, misty deck, carry me
To the cold, go on, high ship, go on, plunge on.

was 2nd hand bookshopping in Rome the other day. Found a rather scuffed and dog-eared copy of facing page Italian/English Wallace Stevens poems. At the very least it was a tremendous store of Italian vocabulary (especially after the spartan vocab of the Montale I'd been reading) and the translations also gave a great feeling of zip and invention.

But it was €50. I asked the store owner whether that could be right, and she said sadly yes, it was an excellent and very hard to find translation :(

Nice documentary (with Merrill) here

Last evening the moon rose above this rock
Impure upon a world unpurged.
The man and his companion stopped
To rest before the heroic height.

Coldly the wind fell upon them
In many majesties of sound:
They that had left the flame-freaked sun
To seek a sun of fuller fire.

Instead there was this tufted rock
Massively rising high and bare
Beyond all trees, the ridges thrown
Like giant arms among the clouds.

There was neither voice nor crested image,
No chorister, nor priest. There was
Only the great height of the rock
And the two of them standing still to rest.

There was the cold wind and the sound
It made, away from the muck of the land
That they had left, heroic sound
Joyous and jubilant and sure.

"If only the boys in the office could see me now!"