I haven't forgotten that I promised to send you some of my favorite Stevens poems Jozy. I'm planning on doing that tomorrow.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jozanny
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I haven't forgotten that I promised to send you some of my favorite Stevens poems Jozy. I'm planning on doing that tomorrow.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jozanny
I meant that it was sophomoric when compared to the stuff in Stevens' Collected Poems...not to the average Freshman to PhD creatuve writng student. Stevens obviously didn't think it was worth collecting, and he was right.:yawnb:Quote:
Originally Posted by quasimodo1
to Nick: I'll withdraw that bit of sarcasm. And he didn't publish it although the decisions about what Stevens got published sometimes was not his own. In this case, I think he demurred. q1
footnote on "Phases" "...525.9...Sections II to V of this group were published in a special 'War Number' of POETRY, November 1914"
from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR XXVII
It is the sea that whitens the roof.
The sea drifts through the winter air.
It is the sea that the north wind makes.
The sea is in the falling snow.
This gloom is the darkness of the sea.
Geographers and philosophers,
Regard. But for that salty cup,
But for the icicles on the eaves--
The sea is a form of ridicule.
The iceberg settings satirize
The demon that cannot be himself,
That tours to shift the shifting scene.
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}
Hi, Virgil - Marlow: Greetings, and where did you find this information?Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
Cheers,
Winifred
Winifred? Is that a long lost Winifred from another place? :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Lady Otter
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.
Greetings, Virgil - No, not lost, just very busy, although our lit forum is small and intimate:
http://www.literaturejunction.com/bo...eds-reads.html
The info about an insurance salesman fighting Hemingway just sounded wild!!!
This looks like an interesting place, too.
It's a better place. :D Stick around. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Lady Otter
Quasi is back. :banana: Good article. Thanks Quasi.Quote:
Originally Posted by quasimodo1
ANOTHER WEEPING WOMAN
Pour the unhappiness out
From your too bitter heart,
Which grieving does not sweeten.
Poison grows in this dark.
It is in the water of tears
Its black blooms rise.
The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world
Leaves you
With him for whom no phantasy moves,
And you are pierced by a death.
(from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose, p.19)
Wallace Stevens, of the modernists, is my most ideal poet and one whom I can understand (or relate to) the most. He is also the one I find most fascinating, simply a genius.
I'm not sure if this was posted yet or not, but it's too good to ignore:
Not Ideas about the Thing, But the Thing Itself
By Wallace Stevens
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside.
. . . . .
[find the rest in Stevens collection of poems "The Rock"]
Though I'm not an expert on Stevens, here's a short essay I wrote for my blog:
This late poem by the philosophical poet of the imagination; Wallace Stevens, seems as an appropriate closing to his work, and yet there are some ambiguities.
Throughout this poem we encounter concepts of inside and outside, of internal and external, subjective and objective. It begins with the untimely ending of winter in March and with the uncanny sound of a “scrawny cry from outside”. Stevens then contradicts himself with the speculative “Seemed like a sound in his mind.”
Here already we have established confusion between the real and the imagination. Stevens never deliberately establishes an explanation of the source of the cry, though he seems to take its externality for granted in the second line, but then hesitating with the acknowledging phrase seemed.
In the next stanza, the occurrence of the cry is postulated, though the time frame seems even more ambiguous with the temporal conjecture “at daylight or before”.
In the next line, we learn that it is daybreak; a rather weary time for those waking up from the hypnotic hallucinations of sleep. Thus suggesting that the “early March wind” of the previous line and serve as an incarnate metaphor for the dreary hypnopoicacy the subjects’ early morning awakening, with all of the surreal ambiguities of the process.
Within this stanza and the one following it, the author attempts to establish a base of reasoning for knowledge of the source. Here, there is a forceful assurance of the externality of the sun, which has ceased to be a “battered panache above snow.” This paradoxical choice of adjectives seems to suggest the sun as once a failed ambition or over-bearer, once in the chaos and confusion of flamboyant youth, it has now matured and learned to sing, rather than scorch. This then gives the sun both subjective and objective meanings: It is seen as a mirror to the psychological development of the author, but, as we will soon see, it also acts as the complete opposite; that seemingly vast and distant external truth that we can never reach.
By the following stanza, Stevens dismisses hypnopoicacy; “It was not from the vast ventriloquism / Of sleeps faded papier mâché. . .” and makes the bold assertion that “it was coming from outside.”
Now building upon his postulations, Stevens turns his attention back to the thing-itself: “That scrawny cry[.]” Here we now find a symbolic summing up of everything said and considered in a pattern of c’s: we encounter chorister, choir, colossal, choral, all having subliminal ties to the sun. First we see that the root of the source in question is described as “a chorister whose c preceded the choir,” a chorister being the leader of a choir, who here begins the chorus in C. Stevens then enigmatically states that “[i]t was part of the colossal sun,” which in fact builds a bridge between two seemingly unrelated metaphors; that of the sun and the scrawny cry and the choir. This analogy of a chorister starting up the chorus and the scrawny cry allegedly coming from outside, is a vivid illustration of the entire epistemological problem following the reader throughout the course of the entire poem, and Steven’s life. Such a problem is that of the foundations of knowledge; how can the waking sleeper be certain of the source of the scrawny cry?
Throughout Stevens’ life he has expressed skepticism towards an answer to this question, but this poem, one of his last ones, ends on an optimistic note, which, despite its intelligence and elegancy, is, in the context of his life’s work, a bit of a cop-out, or at least the dying hopes of an old man.
The final three lines of the poem are overlooked by the overly-comforting and sentimental line “It was like / A new knowledge of reality[,]” which, outside the context of the poem (for it does work rather well within the poem), is quite weak. For, after two-thousand years of Aristotle and Plato, and four-hundred years of a slightly more reasonable Descartes and Kant, the world of philosophy and philosophical literature has grown weary and tired of such old and overused statements, to the point that to say it in Stevens’ time and certainly today, it is almost certainly an epistemological cliché.
But that is if one lets Stevens’ tonal error to allow you to neglect the most important piece of the puzzle. For despite this, Stevens does express his doubts, though much more subtly, with “Surrounded by its coral rings / Still far away,” the second line obviously possessing the maxim, being preceded by a rather mythical and fanciful, perhaps pious, image of a distant sun, which despite its truth and beauty, is still far away. This then brings us the answer to the double-meaning of the sun: it is a pun in the greatest sense of the word, for it is that vast and distant external truth which for two-thousand years no philosopher or thinker has been able to draw an epistemic bridge to, but, more importantly it is his attitude throughout his life towards this dreadful indifference, Stevens now becomes Hamlet and accepts it for what it is and recognizing the victory already won. Maybe this is his declaration of knowledge. Maybe this is his bridge to reality, or at least reality as it can be known. But more or less, Stevens has created a bridge that is not some impersonal, distant and useless form of transcendence, but rather, a bridge inward, to ourselves; for the true meaning of the pun lies not in the one that leads us to despair, but to self-realization. Stevens thus is unique among the philosophers; he is one of the only ones who could dare to utter the infinite aloofness of the sun and not sink in terror or evasion and declare it a curse or loss upon mankind, but instead declaring that the knowledge that we posses about ourselves is our victory.
Looks like a fine essay Daniel. There is a growing number of Wallace Stevens lovers here on Lit Net. Stevens is an acquired taste, but once one understands him, at least somewhat, one just finds enormous depth and incredible poetic skill in his work. I consider him the best American poet of the 20th century. I will make a point to read that poem carefully tonight, before going to bed, and then try to come back to your essay. Thanks for all that. :)
"Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom."
And I agree. I recently dived into his works for the first time, and now I'm in love! I have lived in Connecticut all my life, and to have a vision of New Haven or Hartford in a poetic light is simply amazing, it's brilliant, something to be greatly admired for. He's very meticulous, which is great, thus proving poetry, when crafted right, is above the universal language and is suppose to synthesize all aspects of reality, which I think one tends to forget.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
Here's a great one I like a lot.
Hibiscus by the Sleeping Shore
I say now, Fernando, that on that day
The mind roamed as a moth roams,
Among the blooms beyond the open sand;
And that whatever noise the motion of the waves
Made on the seaweeds and the covered stones
Disturbed not even the most idle ear.
Then it was that that monstered moth
Which had lain folded against the blue
And the colored purple of the lazy sea,
And which had drowsed along the bony shores,
Shut to the blather that the water made,
Rose up bespent and sought the flaming red
Dabbled with yellow pollen --- red as red
As the flag above the old cafe---
And roamed there all the stupid afternoon
It's amazing. Poems I had just glossed over in the past once one is forced to focus on just shine with brilliance. That is a great poem Barbarous. I just never realized it. Look at how special this little triplet is:
Quote:
Then it was that that monstered moth
Which had lain folded against the blue
And the colored purple of the lazy sea,
OF MODERN POETRY
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise. ... {excerpt, from the collection, Parts of a World}
Thank you, quasi, for posting the link to the NYT article about W.S. which I have saved to read later. (BTW, I was glad to see the byline-- Helen Vendler, whose name has popped up before on the LitNet in a poem written by Prince.)
Since the Wallace Stevens thread appeared on the "New Posts" today, maybe now is the appropriate time to ask a question about Mr. Stevens that I've been wondering about with all the threads discussing literature + atheism lately. So maybe Virgil, Quasimodo, DanielB, and/or any other fan of Wallace Stevens can scratch this brain itch:
When we read Wallace Stevens even the most otiose* reader (such as yours truly) can sense the recurrent theme of appreciating "things as they are" in the world that exists by transforming such things through the imagination. In the modern world, imagination is supposedly a substitute for religion. I'm thinking of these beautifully-scannable lines from "Sunday Morning":
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
and later, a denial of the Resurrection:
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
immediately followed by a denial of a Creator:
We live in an old chaos of the sun
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free
Here's the question finally:
Is this the philosophical stance of the speaker only, or do you think it reflects the religious views (or lack of them) of Wallace Stevens himself?
Not that it diminishes the power of his work at all, but was Wallace Stevens an atheist, an agnostic, or what?
*"otiose" cf. an song old parody by Stan Freburg: "Otiose, Muchachos."
The question has come up concerning Stevens point of view on the deity and/or religion. After reading almost all of his poetry and all of his prose, at least what is available to date, one gets the feeling that he at least did not espouse atheism. It is not clear if he was religious in a formal sense although no biographies are taken into account here. In his writing Stevens seems to make opposite points and in fact declares god the supreme leap of imagination. From his UNCOLLECTED PROSE and the essay “A Collect of Philosophy” Stevens quotes Leibniz… “We know a very small part of eternity, which is immeasurable in its extent… Nevertheless from so slight an experience we rashly judge regarding the immeasurable and eternal, like men who, having been born and brought up in prison, or perhaps in the subterranean salt mines of the Sarmatians, should think that there is no other light in the world than that of the feeble lamp which hardly suffices to direct their steps.” Within the essay Stevens quotes Bertrand Russell, Victor Hugo, Copernican theory, Nietzche, Lucretius, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Socrates, Plato, Schopenhauer, Kant and others. The least common denominator of all these philosophies is a bit of higher math I won’t attempt. Stevens writes “I suppose that some kinds of faith require logical, even though fantastic, structures of this kind to support them on the way of that ascent. The number of ways of passing between the traditional two fixed points of man’s life, that is to say, of passing from the self to God, is fixed only be the limitations of space, which is limitless. The eternal philosopher is the eternal pilgrim on that road.” God, Stevens says, is the ultimate poetic idea, and quotes Samuel Alexander’s SPACE, TIME AND DEITY to validate this point. Stevens: “The most significant deduction possible relates to the question of supremacy as between philosophy and poetry. If we say that philosophy is supreme, this means that the reason is supreme over the imagination. But is it? Does not philosophy carry us to a point at which there is nothing left except the imagination? If we rely on the imagination (or, say, intuition), to carry us beyond that point, and if the imagination succeeds in carrying us beyond that point (as in respect to the idea of God, if we conceive of the idea of God as this world’s capital idea), then the imagination is supreme, because its powers have shown themselves to be greater than the powers of the reason. … I might have cited the idea of God when I was speaking of the infinity of the world, of the infinite spaces, which terrified Pascal, the most devout of believers and, in the same abandonment to the superlative, the most profound of thinkers: and it would have been possible, in that case, to conclude what I have to say by placing here at the end a figure which would leave the question of supremacy a question too difficult to attempt to solve. In his words about the sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere, which I quoted a moment ago, we have an instance of words in which traces of the reason and traces of the imagination are mingled together.” After this passage Stevens defers to Max Planck which only underscores the ambivalence which in the end captures his view of both heaven and earth. {a few of Stevens' poems which relate to this... "God is Good, It is a Beautiful Night" -- "The Men That are Falling" -- "Cathedrals are not Built Along the Sea" -- "Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb" -- "Saint Armorer's Church from the Outside"}
Thank you for such a thoughtful and enlightening answer, Quasi. Now that you've whet my appetite for Stevens's prose writings, I'm going to go back and try to locate/read this particular essay. Also, I should read a biography as well.
My instinct tells me that since W.S. was so prominent in his community, he probably did attend some kind of church services in Hartford, at least in a pro forma sort of way,but his core beliefs? Hmm. Poems such as the one I cited "Sunday Morning" and "Air Without Angels"-- the operative word being "without"-- might lead one to believe that W.S. might have stuck his toe in the heathen waters and stopped short of taking the plunge. On the other hand, the theme of reconciling belief with science (the bulk of human knowledge of the time) occurs nearly everywhere in literature -- even with poets who zealously profess their religion faith: from T.S. Eliot all the way back to John "Justify God's ways to Man" Milton (whom you mentioned) and John Donne " 'Tis all in peeces, all coherence gone."
So, when you said that Stevens never blatantly expressed an atheistic belief, I tend to agree with you. But I do think he tended toward agnosticim -- not disbelief in, but "not knowing" God. But far from being comfortable in that stance, there is a constant searching, a quest for reconciliation, an all-out effort to know ("The mind can never be satisfied, never.")
I'm also glad that you brought up an extremely important aspect of Stevens's themes: the imagination. Thanks again for your answer.
"Gray Room" (1917)
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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.
From: THE NECESSARY ANGEL (Essays on Reality and the Imagination)… From: Part II. The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet. Section 5. THE centuries have a way of being male. Without pretending to say whether they get this character from their good heroes or their bad ones, it is certain that they get it, in part, from their philosophers and poets. It is curious, looking back at them, to see how much of the impression that they leave has been derived from the progress of thought in their time and from the abundance of the arts, including poetry, left behind and how little of it comes from prouder and much noisier things. Thus, when we think of the seventeenth century, it is to be remarked how much of the strength of its appearance is associated with the idea that this was a time when the incredible suffered most at the hands of the credible. We think of it as a period of hard thinking. We have only their records and memories by which to recall such eras, not the sight and sound of those that lived in them preserved in an eternity of dust and dirt. When we look back at the face of the seventeenth century, it is at the rigorous face of the rigorous thinker and, say, the Miltonic image of a poet, severe and determined. In effect, what we are remembering is the rather haggard background of the incredible, the imagination without intelligence, from which a younger figure is emerging, stepping forward in the company of a muse of its own, still half-beast and somehow more than human, a kind of sister of the Minotaur. This younger figure is the intelligence that endures. It is the imagination of the son still bearing an antique imagination of the father. It is the clear intelligence of the young man still bearing the burden of the obscurities of the intelligence of the old. It is the spirit out of its own self, not out of some surrounding myth, delineating with accurate speech the complications of which it is composed. For this Aeneas, it is the past that is Anchises. …
From THE NECESSARY ANGEL, Part VI, Imagination as Value… It does not seem possible to say of the imagination that it has a certain single characteristic which of itself gives it a certain single value as, for example, good or evil. To say such a thing would be the same thing as to say that the reason is good or evil or, for that matter, that human nature is good or evil. Since that is my first point, let us discuss it. Pascal called the imagination the mistress of the world. But as he seems never to have spoken well of it, it is certain that he did not use this phrase to speak well of it. He called it the deceptive element in man, the mistress of error and duplicity and yet not always that, since there would be an infallible measure of truth if there were an infallible measure of untruth. But being most often false, it gives no sign of its quality and indicates in the same way both the true and the false. A little farther on in his “Pensees” he speaks of magistrates, their red robes, their ermines in which they swathe themselves, like furry cats, the palaces in which they sit in judgment, the fleurs-de-lis, and the whole necessary, august apparatus. He says, and he enjoys his own malice in saying it, that if medical men did not have their cassocks and the mules they wore and if doctors did not have their square hats and robes four times too large, they would never have been able to dupe the world, which is incapable of resisting so genuine a display. He refers to soldiers and kings, of whom he speaks with complete caution and respect, saying that they establish themselves by force, the others “par grimace.” He justifies monarchs by the strength they possess and says that it is necessary to have a well-defined reason to regard like anyone else the Grand Seigneur surrounded, in his superb seraglio, by forty thousand janissaries. …
From THE NECESSARY ANGEL, Part VII, Section 3: One of the characteristics of modern art is that it is uncompromising. In this it resembles modern politics, and perhaps it would appear on study, including a study of the rights of man and of women’s hats and dresses, that everything modern, or possibly merely new, is, in the nature of things, uncompromising. It is especially uncompromising in respect to precinct. One of the De Goncourts said that nothing in the world hears as many silly things said as a picture in a museum; and in thinking about that remark one has to bear in mind that in the days of the De Goncourts there was no such thing as a museum of modern art. A really modern definition of modern art, instead of making concessions, fixes limits which grow smaller and smaller as time passes and more often than not come to include one man alone, just as if there should be scrawled across the façade of the building in which we now are, the words Cezanne delineavit. Another characteristic of modern art is that it is plausible. It has reason for everything. Even the lack of a reason becomes a reason. Picasso expresses surprise that people should ask what a picture means and says that pictures are not intended to have meanings. This explains everything. Still another characteristic of modern art is that it is bigoted. Every painter who can be defined as a modern painter becomes, by virtue of that definition, a freeman of the world of art and hence the equal of any other modern painter. We recognize that they differ one from another but in any event they are not to be judged except by other modern painters. …
from Ideas Of Order
THE FADING OF THE SUN
Who can think of the sun costuming clouds
When all people are shaken
Or of night endazzled, proud,
When people awaken
And cry and cry for help?
The warm antiquity of self,
Everyone, grows suddenly cold.
The tea is bad, bread sad.
How can the world so old be so mad
That the people die?
If joy shall be without a book
It lies, themselves within themselves,
If they will look
Within themselves
And will not cry for help,
Within as pillars of the sun,
Supports of night. The tea,
The wine is good. The bread,
The meat is sweet.
And they will not die.
from Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose
from Parts of a World
EXAMINATION OF THE HERO IN A TIME OF WAR
I. Force is my lot and not pink-clustered
Roma ni Avignon ni Leyden,
And cold, my element. Death is my
Master and, without light, I dwell. There
The snow hangs heavily on the rocks, brought
By a wind that seeks out shelter from snow. Thus
Each man spoke in winter. Yet each man spoke of
The brightness of arms, said Roma wasted
In its own dirt, said Avignon was
Peace in a time of peace, said Leyden
Was always the other mind. The brightness
Of arms, the will opposed to cold, fate
In its cavern, wings subtler than any mercy,
These were the psalter of their sybils.
II. The Got whome we serve is able to deliver
Us. Good chemistry, good common man, what
Of that angelic sword? Creature of
Ten times ten times dynamite, convulsive
Angel, convulsive shatterer, gun,
Click, click, the Got whom we serve is able,
Still, still to deliver us, still magic,
Still moving yet motionless in smoke, still
One with us, in the heaved-up noise, still
Captain, the man of skill, the expert
Leader, the creator of bursting color
And rainbow sortilege, the savage weapon
Against enemies, against the prester,
Presto, whose whispers prickle the spirit.
{excerpt, two of sixteen parts}