Page 1 of 27 12345611 ... LastLast
Results 1 to 15 of 394

Thread: Wallace Stevens

  1. #1
    Vincit Qui Se Vincit Virgil's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    New York
    Posts
    20,354
    Blog Entries
    248

    Wallace Stevens

    Someone asked me to recommend some peoms by Wallace Stevens. I find him to be one of the fiest American poets of the 20th century. You can read a little about him in Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Stevens.

    The poems I've selected are some of my favorites from years of returning to his poetry. If anyone wants to discuss any of them, please feel free to post.
    LET THERE BE LIGHT

    "Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena

    My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/

  2. #2
    Vincit Qui Se Vincit Virgil's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    New York
    Posts
    20,354
    Blog Entries
    248
    from Sunday Morning
    1
    Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
    Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
    And the green freedom of a cockatoo
    Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
    The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
    She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
    Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
    As a calm darkens among water-lights.
    The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
    Seem things in some procession of the dead,
    Winding across wide water, without sound.
    The day is like wide water, without sound,
    Stilled for the passion of her dreaming feet
    Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
    Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

    2
    Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
    What is divinity if it can come
    Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
    Shall she not find in the comforts of sun,
    In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
    In any balm or beauty of the earth,
    Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
    Divinity must live within herself:
    Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
    Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
    Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
    Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
    All pleasures and all pains, remembering
    The bough of summer and the winter branch.
    These are the measures destined for her soul.

    3
    Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
    No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
    Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind
    He moved among us, as a muttering king,
    Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
    Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
    With heaven, brought such requital to desire
    The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
    Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
    The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
    Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
    The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
    A part of labor and a part of pain,
    And next in glory to enduring love,
    Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

    ...
    LET THERE BE LIGHT

    "Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena

    My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/

  3. #3
    Vincit Qui Se Vincit Virgil's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    New York
    Posts
    20,354
    Blog Entries
    248
    from The Snow Man

    One must have a mind of winter
    To regard the frost and the boughs
    Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

    And have been cold a long time
    To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
    The spruces rough in the distant glitter

    Of the January sun; and not to think
    Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
    In the sound of a few leaves,

    ...
    LET THERE BE LIGHT

    "Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena

    My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/

  4. #4
    Vincit Qui Se Vincit Virgil's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    New York
    Posts
    20,354
    Blog Entries
    248
    from The Emperor of Ice-Cream

    Call the roller of big cigars,
    The muscular one, and bid him whip
    In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
    Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
    As they are used to wear, and let the boys
    Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
    Let be be finale of seem.
    The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

    ....
    LET THERE BE LIGHT

    "Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena

    My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/

  5. #5
    Vincit Qui Se Vincit Virgil's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    New York
    Posts
    20,354
    Blog Entries
    248
    from The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man

    One's grand flights, one's Sunday baths,
    One's tootings at the weddings of the soul
    Occur as they occur. So bluish clouds
    Occurred above the empty house and the leaves
    Of the rhododendrons rattled their gold,
    As if someone lived there. Such floods of white
    Came bursting from the clouds. So the wind
    Threw its contorted strength around the sky.

    ....
    LET THERE BE LIGHT

    "Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena

    My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/

  6. #6
    Vincit Qui Se Vincit Virgil's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    New York
    Posts
    20,354
    Blog Entries
    248
    from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

    1
    Among twenty snowy mountains,
    The only moving thing
    Was the eye of the blackbird.

    2
    I was of three minds,
    Like a tree
    In which there are three blackbirds.

    3
    The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
    It was a small part of the pantomime.

    4
    A man and a woman
    Are one.
    A man and a woman and a blackbird
    Are one.

    5
    I do not know which to prefer,
    The beauty of inflections
    Or the beauty of innuendoes,
    The blackbird whistling
    Or just after.

    6
    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.

    7
    O thin men of Haddam,
    Why do you imagine golden birds?
    ....
    LET THERE BE LIGHT

    "Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena

    My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/

  7. #7
    Vincit Qui Se Vincit Virgil's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    New York
    Posts
    20,354
    Blog Entries
    248
    from The Idea of Order at Key West

    She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
    The water never formed to mind or voice,
    Like a body wholly body, fluttering
    Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
    Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
    That was not ours although we understood,
    Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

    The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
    The song and water were not medleyed sound
    Even if what she sang was what she heard,
    Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
    It may be that in all her phrases stirred
    The grinding water and the gasping wind;
    But it was she and not the sea we heard.
    For 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.
    Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
    It was the spirit that we sought and knew
    That we should ask this often as she sang.

    ....
    LET THERE BE LIGHT

    "Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena

    My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/

  8. #8
    Vincit Qui Se Vincit Virgil's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    New York
    Posts
    20,354
    Blog Entries
    248
    from Peter Quince at the Clavier


    I

    Just as my fingers on these keys
    Make music, so the self-same sounds
    On my spirit make a music, too.
    Music is feeling, then, not sound;
    And thus it is that what I feel,
    Here in this room, desiring you,

    Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
    Is music. It is like the strain
    Waked in the elders by Susanna;

    Of a green evening, clear and warm,
    She bathed in her still garden, while
    The red-eyed elders, watching, felt

    The basses of their beings throb
    In witching chords, and their thin blood
    Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

    II

    In the green water, clear and warm,
    Susanna lay.

    ....
    LET THERE BE LIGHT

    "Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena

    My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/

  9. #9
    Vincit Qui Se Vincit Virgil's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    New York
    Posts
    20,354
    Blog Entries
    248
    from Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour


    Light the first light of evening
    In which we rest and, for small reason, think
    The world imagined is the ultimate good.

    This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
    It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
    Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

    Within a single thing, a single shawl
    Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
    A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

    Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.


    ....
    LET THERE BE LIGHT

    "Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena

    My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/

  10. #10
    Vincit Qui Se Vincit Virgil's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    New York
    Posts
    20,354
    Blog Entries
    248
    from The Plain Sense of Things

    After the leaves have fallen, we return
    To a plain sense of things. It is as if
    We had come to the end of the imagination,
    Inanimate in an inert savoir.

    It is difficult even to choose the adjective
    For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
    The great structure has become a minor house.
    No turban walks across the lessened floors.



    ....
    LET THERE BE LIGHT

    "Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena

    My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/

  11. #11
    Registered User quasimodo1's Avatar
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Bensalem, PA 19020
    Posts
    3,267

    partial bio/later life of Wallace Stevens

    All his life Stevens collected art from abroad and saw that packages of various gourmet foods were mailed to him regularly. Although he regularly traveled in the South, most notably to Florida and the Florida Keys and Cuba, he never ventured abroad. But his cosmopolitan yearnings were amply satisfied by regular jaunts to New York City. Trains leaving Hartford on a better-than-hourly basis guaranteed that any Saturday he could be on the streets of New York City by 10 a.m. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was welcomed as a member of the exclusive set centered around the artistic and literary devotees Barbara and Henry Church.

    {snip}

    Source: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets...vens/biography

  12. #12
    Vincit Qui Se Vincit Virgil's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    New York
    Posts
    20,354
    Blog Entries
    248
    Thank you Quasi. He did lead an interesting life. He wrote poetry as a young man but then got a job in the business world and wrote poems on the side when not busy, sort of like me at my job. He ultimately became vice-president of his company and like you said finally made it big in the poetry world after he had retired at an old age. He did like going to Florida and many of his poems contrast the wintery north with the summery south. In one famous incident I think in the Florida Keys he got into a fist fight with Ernest Hemmingway. Unfortunate for Stevens, who was not normally a fighting man, was punched out and I think knocked out by Hemmingway. His poetry strikes me as a gentle soul.

    If anyone gets a chance to read "The Auroras of Autumn," (the poem, not the enite book of the same name) please do. It is a wonderful poem. I couldn't find it on the internet and it was a little long to type out.
    LET THERE BE LIGHT

    "Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena

    My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/

  13. #13
    seasonably mediocre Il Penseroso's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2006
    Location
    montana
    Posts
    1,113
    Blog Entries
    7
    Rather long, but one of my all time favorites (what got me into Stevens) :


    from The Man With the Blue Guitar
    I
    The man bent over his guitar,
    A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

    They said, "You have a blue guitar,
    You do not play things as they are."

    The man replied, "Things as they are
    Are changed upon the blue guitar."

    And they said then, "But play, you must,
    A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

    A tune upon the blue guitar
    Of things exactly as they are."

    II

    I cannot bring a world quite round,
    Although I patch it as I can.

    I sing a hero's head, large eye
    And bearded bronze, but not a man,

    Although I patch him as I can
    And reach through him almost to man.

    If to serenade almost to man
    Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

    Say that it is the serenade
    Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

    III

    Ah, but to play man number one,
    To drive the dagger in his heart,

    To lay his brain upon the board
    And pick the acrid colors out,

    To nail his thought across the door,
    Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

    To strike his living hi and ho,
    To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

    To bang it from a savage blue,
    Jangling the metal of the strings...

    ....
    and somehow a dog
    has taken itself & its tail considerably away
    into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
    behind: me, wag.
    - John Berryman

  14. #14
    yes, that's me, your friendly Moderator 💚 Logos's Avatar
    Join Date
    Feb 2004
    Posts
    6,508
    Blog Entries
    19
    General Mod Note to All:

    Please bear this in mind when posting poems:

    http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=17769
    .
    .
    Forum » Rules » FAQ » Tags » Blogs » Groups » Quizzes » e-Texts »
    .
    📚 📚 📒 📓 📙 📘 📖 ✍🏻 📔 📒 📗 📒 📕 📚 📚 📚 📚 📚 📚 📚
    .

  15. #15
    Vincit Qui Se Vincit Virgil's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    New York
    Posts
    20,354
    Blog Entries
    248
    Logos, so I'm supposed to provide a link from where I got the poems? If that's correct, and please reply to tell me so, I will gladly do that.

    Il Pen - Yes that's a favorite of mine too, but I thought it too long to post. Glad you did.
    LET THERE BE LIGHT

    "Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena

    My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/

Page 1 of 27 12345611 ... LastLast

Similar Threads

  1. Alfie Wallace: A Love-story
    By MAXIM in forum Short Story Sharing
    Replies: 7
    Last Post: 12-30-2007, 08:26 AM
  2. Poem by Wallace Stevens
    By mkibbe in forum Poems, Poets, and Poetry
    Replies: 1
    Last Post: 10-20-2006, 01:33 PM
  3. What kind of literature "scares" you?
    By lavendar1 in forum General Literature
    Replies: 24
    Last Post: 08-12-2005, 01:24 AM
  4. The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens
    By Sitaram in forum Poems, Poets, and Poetry
    Replies: 4
    Last Post: 03-05-2005, 04:49 PM

Tags for this Thread

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •