Wallace Stevens

from Stevens' Collected Poetry & Prose

from Ideas of Order

LIONS IN SWEDEN

No more phrases, Swenson: I was once
A hunter of those sovereigns of the soul
And savings banks, Fides, the sculptor's prize,
All eyes and size, and galled Justitia,
Trained to poise the tables of the law,
Patientia forever soothing wounds
And mighty Fortitudo, frantic bass.
But these shall not adorn my souvenirs,
Of the soul must likewise be at fault, and first.
If the fault is with the souvenirs, yet these
Are the soul itself. And the whole of the soul, Swenson,
As every man in Sweden will concede,
Still hankers after lions, or, to shift,
Still hankers after sovereign images.
{excerpt}

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Ideas of Order

HOW TO LIVE. WHAT TO DO

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.

.........................................

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.
{excerpt}

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

from Parts Of A World

THE BLUE BUILDINGS IN THE SUMMER AIR

I. Cotton Mather died when I was a boy. The books
He read, all day, all night and all the nights,
Had got him nowhere. There was always the doubt,
That made him preach the louder, long for a church
In which his voice would roll its cadences,
After the sermon, to quiet that mouse in the wall.

II. Over wooden Boston, the sparkling Byzantine
Was everything that Cotton Mather was
And more. Yet the eminent thunder from the mouse,
The grinding in the arches of the church,
The plaster dropping, even dripping, down,
The mouse, the moss, the woman on the shore. . . .

III. If the mouse should swallow the steeple, in its time
It was a theologian's needle, much
Too sharp for that. The shore, the sea, the sun,
Their brilliance through the lattices, crippled
The chandeliers, their morning glazes spread
In opal blobs along the walls and floor.

IV. Look down now, Cotton Mather, from the blank.
Was heaven where you thought? It must be there.
It must be where you think it is, in the light
On bed-clothes, in an apple on a plate.
It is the honey-comb of the seeing man.
It is the leaf the bird brings back to the boat.

{excerpt}

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Parts Of A World

CUISINE BOURGEOISE

These days of disinheritance, we feast
On human heads. True, birds rebuild
Old nests and there is blue in the woods.
The church bells clap one night in the week.
But that's all done. It is what used to be,
As they used to lie in the grass, in the heat,
Men on green beds and women half of sun.
The words are written, though not yet said.

It is like the season when, after summer,
It is summer and it is not, it is autumn
And it is not, it is day and it is not,
As if last night's lamps continued to watch
The sky, half porcelain, preferring that
To shaking out heavy bodies in the glares
Of this present, this science, this unrecognized,

This outpost, this douce, this dumb, this dead, in which
We feast on human heads, brought in on leaves,
Crowned with the first, cold buds. On these we live,
No longer on the ancient cake of seed,
The almond and deep fruit. .......... {excerpt}

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Parts Of A World

POEM WITH RHYTHMS

The hand between the candle and the wall
Grows large on the wall.
The mind between this light or that and space,
(This man in a room with an image of the world,
That woman waiting for the man she loves,)
Grows large against space:

There the man sees the image clearly at last.
There the woman receives her lover into her heart
And weeps on his breast, though he never comes.

It must be that the hand
Has a will to grow larger on the wall,
To grow larger and heavier and stronger than
The wall; and that the mind
Turns to its own figurations and declares,
"This image, this love, I compose myself
Of these. ... {excerpt}

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Parts Of A World

"THE IMMENSE POETRY OF WAR"

The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work of the imagination are two different things. In the presence of the violent reality of war, consciousness takes the place of the imagination. And consciousness of an immense war is a consciousness of fact. If that is true, it follows that the poetry of war as a consciousness of the victories and defeats of nations, is a consciousness of fact, but of heroic fact, of fact on such a scale that the mere consciousness of it affects the scale of one's thinking and constitutes a participating in the heroic.
It has been easy to say in recent times that everything tends to become real, or, rather, that everything moves in the direction of reality, that is to say, in the direction of fact. We leave fact and come back to it, come back to what we wanted fact to be, not to what it was, not to what it has too often remained. The poetry of a work of the imagination constantly illustrates the fundamental and endless struggle with fact. It goes on everywhere, even in the periods that we call peace. But in war, the desire to move in the direction of fact as we want it to be and to move quickly is overwhelming.
Nothing will ever appease this desire except a consciousness of fact as everyone is at least satisfied to have it be.
W.S.

I really appreciated the quote "THE IMMENSE POETRY OF WAR."

We Koreans went through so many wars during our 5000 years of history. There is even a Korean word, "han" that means "sadness ingrained in our heart." If we did not have a direct experience of war, we would go through with it indirectly by our mothers and grandmothers. Grandmothers who lost all but one child would tell you how she lost her children so often that there is not much room for imagination when it comes to war. Now the Korean War Memorial reminds younger generations of our wars. I will put a war poem under Korean poems.

Thank you as always.

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose

OWL'S CLOVER

I. The Old Woman & The Statue

Another evening in another park,
A group of marble horses rose on wings
In the midst of a circle of trees, from which the leaves
Raced with the horses in bright hurricanes.

II. So much the sculptor had forseen: autumn,
The sky above the plaza widening
Before the horses, clouds of bronze imposed
On clouds of gold, and green engulfing bronze,
The marble leaping in the storms of light.
So much he had devised: white forelegs taut
To the muscles' very tip for the vivid plunge,
The heads held high and gathered in a ring
At the center of the mass, the haunches low,
Contorted, staggering from the thrust against
The earth as the bodies rose on feathery wings,
Clumped carvings, circular, like blunted fans,
Arranged for phantasy to form an edge
Of crisping light along the statue's rim.
More than his muddy hand was in the manes,
More than his mind in the wings. The rotten leaves
Swirled round them in immense autumnal sounds.

III. But her he had not forseen: the bitter mind
In a flapping cloak. She walked along the paths
Of the park with chalky brow scratched over black
And black by thought that could not understand
Or, if it understood, repressed itself
Without any pity in a somnolent dream.
The golden clouds that turned to bronze, the sounds
Descending, did not touch her eye and left
Her ear unmoved. She was that tortured one,
So destitute that nothing but herself
Remained and nothing of herself except
A fear too naked for her shadow's shape.
To search for clearness all an afternoon
And without knowing, and then upon the wind
To hear the stroke of one's certain solitude,
What sound could comfort away the sudden sense?
What path could lead apart from what she was
And was to be? Could it happen to be this,
This atmosphere in which her musty mind
Lay black and full of black misshapen? Wings
And light lay deeper for her than her sight.

{long poem of five parts}

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Chronology

1934 After long hiatus, new poems ("things more or less improvised") appear in journals. Writes introduction for William Carlos Williams' COLLECTED POEMS, 1921-1931. Is made a vice-president of the Hartford.

1935 Meets and spends time with Robert Frost in Key West. Discouraged by Elsie from drinking at home, becomes connoisseur of teas; frequently joins friends for martinis at the Canoe Club in Hartford. Ronald Lane Latimer's Alcestis Press publishes limited edition of IDEAS OF ORDER in August. Begins working on poetic sequence OWL'S CLOVER.

1936 Provokes drunken fight with Ernest Hemingway while in Key West in February; breaks right hand in two places from hitting Hemingway's jaw, and is knocked down; the two make up before Stevens leaves (tells Elsie he fell down a flight of stairs). IDEAS OF ORDER published by Knopf in October, favorable reviews acknowledge Stevens as a major American poet. In fall, along with brother John, begins to support ailing brother Garrett Jr. OWL'S CLOVER published by Alcestis Press in November, reads portions of it, along with lecture "The Irrational Element in Poetry," at Harvard in December. Wins poetry prize from The Nation for "The Men That Are Falling."

Stevens in a letter to Harriet Monroe, 1922... "The desire to write a long poem or two is not obsequiousness to the

judgment of people. On the contrary, I find that prolonged attention to a single subject has the same result that

prolonged attention to a senora has, according to the authorities. All maner of favors drop from it. Only it

requires a skill in the varying of the serenade that occasionally makes me feel like a Guatemalan when one

particularly wants to feel like an Italian" Continued in his next letter... "I wish that I could put everything

else aside and amuse myself on a large scale for a while. One never gets anywhere in writinng or thinking or

observing unless one can do long stretches at a time. Often I have let go, in the most insignificant poem, which

scarcely serves to remind me of it, the most skyey of skyey sheets. And often when I have a real fury for

indulgence I must stint myself."

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from The Man With The Blue Guitar

OWL'S CLOVER

III. High up in heaven as sprawling portent moves,
As if it bears all darkness in its bulk,
But this we cannot see. The shaggy top
Broods in tense meditation, constantly,
On the city, on which it leans, the people there,
Its shadow on their houses, on their walls,
Their beds, their faces drawn in distant sleep.
This is invisible. The supporting arms
Reach from the horizons, rim to rim,
While the shaggy top collects itself to do
And the shoulders run, breathing immense intent.
All this is hidden from sight.
It is the form
Of a generation that does not know itself,
Still questioning if to crush the soaring stacks.
The man below beholds the portent poised,
An image of his making, beyond the eye.
The year's dim elongations stretch below
To tumbled rock, its bright projections lie
The shallowest iris on the emptiest eye.
The future must bear within it every past,
Not least the pasts destroyed, magniloquent
Syllables, pewter on ebony, yet still
A board for bishops' grapes, the happy form
That revolution takes for connoisseurs:
The portent may itself be memory;
And memory may itself be time to come
And must be, when the portent, changed, takes on
A mask up-gathered brilliantly from the dirt,
And memory's lord is the lord of prophesy
And steps forth, priestly in severity,
Yet lord, a mask of flame, the darkest form
A wandering orb upon a path grown clear.

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from The Necessary Angel
(Essays on Reality and the Imagination)

VII. THE RELATIONS BETWEEN POETRY AND PAINTING

Roger Fry concluded a note on Claude by saying that "few of us live so strenuously as never to feel a sense of nostalgia for the Saturnian reign to which Virgil and Claude can waft us." He spoke in that same note of Corot and Whistler and Chinese landscape and certainly he might just as well have spoken, in relation to Claude, of many poets, as, for example, Chenier or Wordsworth. This is simply the analogy between two different forms of poetry. It might be better to say that it is the identity of poetry revealed as between poetry in words and poetry in paint.
Poetry, however, is not limited to Virgilian landscape, nor painting to Claude. We find the poetry of mankind in the figures of the old men of Shakespeare, say, ad the old men of Rembrandt; or in the figures of Biblical women, on the hand, and of the madonnas of all Europe, on the other; and it is easy to wonder whether the poetry of children has not been created by the poetry of the Child, until one stops to think how much of the poetry of the whole world is the poetry of children, both as they are and as they have been written of and painted, as if they were the creatures of a dimension in which life and poetry are one. The poetry of humanity is, of course, to be found everywhere.
There is a universal poetry that is reflected in everything. This remark approaches the idea of Baudelaire that there exists an unascertained and fundamental aesthetic, or order, of which poetry and painting are manifestations, but of which, for that matter, sculpture or music or any other aesthetic realization would equally be a manifestation. Generalizations as expansive as these: that there is universal poetry that is reflected in everything or that there may be a fundamental aesthetic of which poetry and painting are related but dissimilar manifestations, are speculative. One is better satisfied by particulars.
No poet can have failed to recognize how often a detail, a propos or remark, in respect to painting, applies also to poetry. The truth is that there seems to exist a corpus of remarks in respect to painting, most often the remarks of painters themselves, which are a s significant to poets as to painters. ...

Variations on a Summer Day
I

Say of the gulls that they are flying
In light blue air over dark blue sea.

II

A music more than a breath, but less
Than the wind, sub-music like sub-speech,
A repetition of unconscious things,
Letters of rock and water, words
Of the visible elements and of ours.

III

The rocks of the cliffs are the heads of dogs
That turn into fishes and leap
Into the sea.

IV

Star over Monhegan, Atlantic star,
Lantern without a bearer, you drift,
You, too, are drifting, in spite of your course;
Unless in the darkness, brightly-crowned
You are the will, if there is a will,
Or the portent of a will that was,
One of the portents of the will that was.

V

The leaves of the sea are shaken and shaken.
There was a tree that was a father.
We sat beneath it and sang our songs.


VI

It is cold to be forever young,
To come to tragic shores and flow,
In sapphire, round the sun-bleached stones,
Being, for old men, time of their time.

VII

One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls,
When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops.
He mocks the guineas, challenges
The crow, inciting various modes.
The sparrow requites one, without intent.

VIII

An exercise in viewing the world.
On the motive! But one looks at the sea
As one improvises, on the piano.

IX

This cloudy world, by aid of land and sea,
Night and day, wind and quiet, produces
More nights, more days, more clouds, more worlds.

X

To change nature, not merely to change ideas,
To escape from the body, so to feel
Those feelings that the body balks,
The feelings of the natures round us here:
As a boat feels when it cuts blue water.
{from Stevens' Parts of a World, 10 of 20 stanzas, 1946}

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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.

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Hi, Virgil - Marlow: Greetings, and where did you find this information?

Cheers,
Winifred

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lady Otter

Hi, Virgil - Marlow: Greetings, and where did you find this information?

Cheers,
Winifred

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Winifred? Is that a long lost Winifred from another place? :D

What speicifically are you referring to, the biographical info or the Hemingway fight? The biographical you can get by going to wikipedia. The fight with Hemingway i remember reading it somewhere and it stuck in my head. I can't remember where. Sorry.