Wallace Stevens

[TheFifthElement]

Good choice Symphony The House was Quiet and the World Was Calm is one of my favourites.

Two personal faves of mine:

Domination of Black

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The color of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind......
................................

And, Six Significant Landscapes, these are my two favourites:

II
The night is of the color
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.

VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses -
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon -
Rationalists would wear sombreros.

But there are so many. Stevens was a most excellent poet.

[quasimodo1]

The Planet On The Table


.....His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Contrary Theses (II)



One chemical afternoon in mid-autumn,
When the grand mechanics of earth and sky were

near;
Even the leaves of the locust were yellow then,


He walked with his year-old boy on his shoulder.
The sun shone and the dog barked and the baby

slept.
The leaves, even of the locust, the green locust.


He wanted and looked for a final refuge,
From the bombastic intimations of winter
And the martyrs a la mode. He walked toward


An abstract, of which the sun, the dog, the boy
Were contours. Cold was chilling the wide-moving

swans.
The leaves were falling like notes from a piano. ... {excerpt}

[Virgil]

Contrary Theses (II)



One chemical afternoon in mid-autumn,
When the grand mechanics of earth and sky were

near;
Even the leaves of the locust were yellow then,


He walked with his year-old boy on his shoulder.
The sun shone and the dog barked and the baby

slept.
The leaves, even of the locust, the green locust.


He wanted and looked for a final refuge,
From the bombastic intimations of winter
And the martyrs a la mode. He walked toward


An abstract, of which the sun, the dog, the boy
Were contours. Cold was chilling the wide-moving

swans.
The leaves were falling like notes from a piano. ... {excerpt}

Good one Quasi. I've never read that one before. I'll have to search it out in my Stevens.

[quasimodo1]

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 ... {...excerpt}

[kgremore]

hey... thanks for the comment. Yea, I wrote it about a summer ago. I was goign to private message you butI couldn't find a link.
What do you honestly think of it?

[stlukesguild]

Posted before... but never hurts to read it again:

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

We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

Wallace Stevens- from-Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

[quasimodo1]

"...The wheel survives the myths.
The fire eye in the clouds survives the gods.
To think of a dove with an eye of grenadine
And pines that are comets, so it occurs,
And a little island full of geese and stars:
It may be that the ignorant man, alone,
Has any chance to mate his life with life
That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life
That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze." from The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man
by Wallace Stevens

[Virgil]

God I love Stevens. The last two are among my favorites. I can almost quote them by heart.

[quasimodo1]

You know Virgil, Stevens is one of those extremely rare poets whose work, when you return to it, still shocks you its so good. Here's another gem... "...If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. 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." from The Idea of Order at Key West
by Wallace Stevens

[Virgil]

You know Virgil, Stevens is one of those extremely rare poets whose work, when you return to it, still shocks you its so good.

I agree.

[Guinivere]

Gray Room

Although you sit in a room that is gray,
Except for the silver
Of the straw-paper,
And pick
At your pale white gown;
Or lift one of the green beads
Of your necklace,
To let it fall;
Or gaze at your green fan
Printed with the red branches of a red willow;
Or, with one finger,
Move the leaf in the bowl--
The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia
Beside you...
What is all this?
I know how furiously your heart is beating.

[firefangled]

I haven't read Poems of Our Climate for years yet I still distinctly remember the thud it made as it hit the wall against which I had thrown it. Now that is not to say I didn't relish some of what it had to say about Mr. Stevens but Bloom! Stars that man has an ego.

What I find amazing about Bloom is his never-ending desire to fight and his unstoppable (apparent) anxiety about how he will be misinterpreted by those who will write against him from the future. I think about how Bloom approaches Stevens in parallel with thinking about Stevens' ideas about the nature of reality and resemblance. What I always come up with is the most astonishing sense of irony as if Bloom had tried to climb into Stevens' trousers and found, much to his vexation, that they fit.

Well...enough of ire.

One thing I do remember clearly, that I also liked unreservedly, was the notion that Stevens was an undeclared Emersonian transcendentalist. What do you think about the veracity of this? And its conceptual reach?

Well, there's nothing like waiting a year to respond.

I have obviously missed scrolling down in this thread, even though Stevens is possibly my favorite poet.

I'm not sure how I would classify Stevens, or even try. I do picture the place that his poetry occupies as the small space between the fingers of Adam and God in Michelangelo's Creation. The imag(e)ination for Stevens was the key to our knowing. Whether that makes him a transcendentalist or not is up to those who like to classify things.

[firefangled]

Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination


Last Friday, in the big light of last Friday night,
We drove home from Cornwall to Hartford, late.

It was not a night blown at a glassworks in Vienna
Or Venice, motionless, gathering time and dust.

There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round,
Under the front of the westward evening star,

The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,
As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,

Either in distance, change or nothingness,
The visible transformation of summer night,

An argentine abstraction, approaching form
and suddenly denying itself away. {excerpt}

- Wallace Stevens

[firefangled]

The Dove in the Belly

The whole of appearance is a toy. For this,
The dove in the belly builds his nest and coos,

Selah, tempestuous bird. How is it that
The rivers shine and hold their mirrors up,

Like excellence collecting excellence?
How is it that the wooden trees stand up

And live and heap their panniers of green
And hold them round the sultry day? Why should

These mountains being high be, also, bright,
Fetched up with snow that never falls to earth?

And this great esplanade of corn, miles wide,
Is something wished for made effectual... {excerpt}

-Wallace Stevens