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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.
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.
...
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,
...
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.
....
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.
....
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?
....
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.
....
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.
....
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.
....
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.
....
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
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. :D 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.
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...
....
General Mod Note to All:
Please bear this in mind when posting poems:
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=17769
.
.
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.
Have you read The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination by Stevens?
No, I'm afraid I haven't. I have heard of it, and if I had reason to while I was in school I would have. I ought to someday.Quote:
Originally Posted by MaryLupin
I'm actually confused as to what we did wrong, or differently, in this thread as opposed to others, the ee cummings one in particular.
Logos
General Mod Note to All:
Please bear this in mind when posting poems:
http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=17769
Il Penseroso
I'm actually confused as to what we did wrong, or differently, in this thread as opposed to others, the ee cummings one in particular.
--
It is happening more and more lately, little discussion, and lots of copyrighted stuff being posted. I don't know how much more clear I can be in the above link I posted, but I'm just asking people to please think about what they're posting before they do so :)
Logos,
I apologize. I've been one to run with the crowd and figure if others are doing it it must be ok. Are we allowed to post the poems if there is discussion? I think we've got plenty to discuss here already.
back to the subject of the thread...
I always find Stevens' poems to be very helpful in the writing process. I'm one who sort of likes to be confused, and often after reading one of his poems it's helpful to sit and try to write something that may clarify a point to myself. He's also a very auditory poet, whose words ring like bells and clanging metal molded to his thoughts, which also often inspires me to write.
Thank you Logos, for this and the PM explaining this. But what should I now do? Delete the poems, snip them and post a link, or just tag a link to the bottom of each? Actually I believe a few of those may have been written prior to 1923. I can check. Just give me some guidence on how I should correct what I've done.Quote:
Originally Posted by Logos
For poems published pre-1923 and in public domain, you can post them in entirety. For poems published post 1923, ideally you would post just a stanza or two (fair use, so yes, 'snip' what is already there.) If you have typed it out yourself you could mention the publication you got it from, or, post a link to the site that does have permission to post the authors' works in entirety.
[Like "The Official Web Site of Mark Twain", "The Walt Whitman Archive", or "The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford " that has holdings of author's manuscripts etc.]
Please don't get me wrong or think I'm trying to shut this down :blush: This forum is dedicated to the discussion of "Poems, Poets, and Poetry: Discuss those who paint with words and the works that they create." and I'm very happy it is so busy lately and interest in poets not discussed before is arising :)
It is one of those things that come in small packages, like, mmm, ah yes, Diamonds!Quote:
Originally Posted by MaryLupin
Have you seen Harold Bloom's The Poems of Our Culture?
The Man With the Blue Guitar and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird are two of my favorites. Along with, of course, Of Mere Being.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by firefangled
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?
I don't know that I have a favorite Stevens poem. It depends so much on how I am feeling and upon what I am thinking. I do keep coming back to Thirteen Ways though.
Here's one of my favorites:
The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
... ... ...
http://www.repeatafterus.com/title.php?i=4700
Edit: Uhm... i copied it from that link, but now as i read it... wouldnt that be "much most to be" in line 7? :confused:
That is a good one Symph. Thanks. I haven't read any Stevens lately. Time to start again. :)
wally stevens is probably my favorite poet of all time. i was hooked after reading 13 ways of looking at a blackbird...."inflections or innuendos..." he had a beautiful mind.
The Emperor of Ice-cream-Cream is my favorite Stevens poem:http://www.everypoet.com/archive/poe..._ice_cream.htm
To me Stevens belongs in the second tier of the great American poets along with Robert Frost (although I prefer Frost), the first tier is ruled by the greatest of the greats, i-e Mr TS Eliot (American???) and Ezra Pound.
Funny you should mention that. I was just thinking about that poem, i wrote a tiny poem on that one very recently, and i was just pondering about how bad mine was. :lol:Quote:
The Emperor of Ice-cream-Cream is my favorite Stevens poem
Eliot is a british poet born in america i believe.Quote:
Mr TS Eliot (American???)
Good choice Symphony The House was Quiet and the World Was Calm is one of my favourites.
Two personal faves of mine:
Quote:
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:
Quote:
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.
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}
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by 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}
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?
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
"...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
God I love Stevens. The last two are among my favorites. I can almost quote them by heart. :) :)
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