Jermac, he's not really unkonwn and not underrated. He's generally regarded as the top American poet of the 20th century. I agree though, he's not a household name.Originally Posted by Jermac
Jermac, he's not really unkonwn and not underrated. He's generally regarded as the top American poet of the 20th century. I agree though, he's not a household name.
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena
My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/
That's why I included the word "relatively." Wallace Stevens generally doesn't really enter into a discussion of the great American poets of the twentieth century. Personally, I think he was one of the great American poets, but I dare say that if you took a hundred people who were even remotely interested in poetry and asked them who were the great American poets of the twentieth century, ten of them might include Wallace Stevens; ninety of them would not mention him.
Sadly you're right.
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena
My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/
from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Uncollected Poems
MANDOLIN AND LIQUEURS
La-la! The cat is in the violets
And the awnings are let down.
The cat should not be where she is
And the awnings are too brown,
Emphatically so.
If awnings were celeste and gay,
Iris and orange, crimson and green,
Blue and vermillion, purple and white,
And not this tinsmith's galaxy,
Things would be different.
The sun is gold, the moon is silver.
There must be a planet that is copper
And in whose light the roses
Would have a most singular appearance,
Or nearly so.
I love to sit and read the Telegraph,
That vast confect of telegrams,
And to find how much that really matters
Does not really matter
At all.
from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Transport to Summer
DEBRIS OF LIFE AND MIND
There is so little that is close and warm.
It is as if we were never children.
Sit in the room. It is true in the moonlight
That it is as if we had never been young.
We ought not to be awake. It is from this
That a bright red woman will be rising
And, standing in violent golds, will brush her hair.
She will speak thoughtfully the words of a line.
She will think about them not quite able to sing.
Besides, when the sky is so blue, things sing themselves,
Even for her, already for her. She will listen
And feel that her color is a meditation,
The most gay and yet not so gay as it was.
Stay here. Speak of familiar things a while.
Ooh, I love those last sentences:
Hey Quasi. Nice to see you back....She will listen
And feel that her color is a meditation,
The most gay and yet not so gay as it was.
Stay here. Speak of familiar things a while.
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena
My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/
from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Poems Added to Harmonium
THE DEATH OF A SOLDIER
Life contracts and death is expected,
As in a season of autumn.
The soldier falls.
He does not become a three-days personage,
Imposing hi separation,
Calling for pomp.
Death is absolute and without memorial,
As in a season of autumn,
When the wind stops,
When the wind stops and, over the heavens,
The clouds go, nevertheless,
In their direction.
That's a great one! Thanks Quasi. I've never seen it before.
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena
My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/
Well, I guess Stevens will eventually come to get the reputation and popularity he deserves, in part thanks to Mr. Bloom, who has been jeering at Eliot and Pound and Williams whenever he can (that knucklehead!)
from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Letters
TO RONALD LANE LATIMER
{November 26, 1935}
Dear Mr. Latimer:
The music of poetry which creates its own fictions is one of the "sisterhood of the living dead". It is a muse; all of the muses are of that sisterhood. But then I cannot say, at this distance of time, that I specifically meant the muses; this is just an explanation. I don't think that I meant anything definitely except all the things that live in memory and imagination.
Titles with me are, of course, of the highest importance. Some years ago a student of Wesleyan came up to the office. Apparently he had been given the job of writing a paper on Harmonium. He was under the impression that there was no relation whatever between the titles and the poems. Possibly the relation is not as direct and as literal as it ought to be. Very often the title occurs to me before anything else occurs to me. This is not uncommon; I knew a man in New York who ought to know who once told me that many more people have written the first chapters of novels than have written the rest of them, and that still more people have given their novels titles without having given them any bodies.
When you ask about a pattern of metaphors you are asking about the sort of thing with which one constantly experiments. For instance, I am very much afraid that what you like in my poetry is just the sort of thing that you ought not to like: say, its music or color. If that is true, then an appropriate experiment would be to write poetry without music and without color.* But so many of these experiments come to nothing. If they were highly successful, well and good, but they so rarely are.
I suppose that the explanation for the bursts of freedom is nothing more than this: that when one is thinking one's way the pattern becomes small and complex, but when one has reached a point and finds it possible to move emotionally one goes ahead rapidly. One of the most difficult things in writing poetry is to know what one's subject is. Most people know what it is and do not write poetry, because they are so conscious of that one thing. One's subject is always poetry, or should be. But sometimes it becomes a little more definite and fluid, and then the thing goes ahead rapidly.
Yours very truly, WS
*In music, this would give you Schonberg.
from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from The Rock
THE IRISH CLIFFS OF MOHER
Who is my father in this world, in this house,
At the spirit's base?
My father's father, his father's father, his--
Shadows like winds
Go back to a parent before thought, before speech,
At the head of the past.
They go to the cliffs of Moher rising out of the mist,
Above the real,
Rising out of present time and place, above
The wet, green grass.
This is not landscape, full of the somnambulations
Of poetry
And the sea. This is my father or, maybe,
It is as he was,
A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earth
And sea and air.
I have an older book of Wallace Stevens around my house somewhere. I think it was from my college days. Anyway, I never took to his poetry until I read the ones presented here. Thanks for posting them, quasi. I really loved the last 3 or 4. I will have to read the whole thread. Some beautiful flowing poetry. I'm impressed!
"It's so mysterious, the land of tears."
Chapter 7, The Little Prince ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Janine, Stevens is a bit of an acquired taste. But once you see his art, you realize what a master he is.
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena
My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/
Stevens, an acquired taste for sure, and some patience is required but he's not as inaccessible as some new readers might expect. "To name an object is to deprive a poem of three-fourths of its pleasure, which consists in a little-by-little guessing game; the ideal is to suggest."
Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955)
from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Transport to Summer
HUMAN ARRANGEMENT
Place-bound and time-bound in evening rain
And bound by a sound which does not change,
Except that it begins and ends,
Begins again and ends again--
Rain without change within or from
Without. In this place and in this time
And in this sound, which do not change,
In which the rain is all one thing,
In the sky, an imagined, wooden chair
Is the clear-point of an edifice,
Forced up from nothing, evening's chair,
Blue-strutted curule, true-- unreal,
The center of transformations that
Transform for transformation's self,
In a glitter that is a life, a gold
That is a being, a will, a fate.
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