Eratosphere Forums - Metrical Poetry, Free Verse, Fiction, Art, Critique, Discussions Able Muse - a review of poetry, prose and art

Forum Left Top

Notices

Reply
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1  
Unread 02-05-2017, 10:12 AM
Michael F's Avatar
Michael F Michael F is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: a foothill of the Catskills
Posts: 968
Default Wallace Stevens

I’ve threatened a couple of times to start a Stevens thread, and we’ve invoked him recently hereabouts, so what the hell, today is Sunday, and in the complacencies of my peignoir, I'm going to do it. My Stevens is 2500 miles away in the snowy east now, but I’ll kick it off with some general thoughts (with special reference to “The Comedian as the Letter C”, which I have shaded elsewhere...), and then with a poem that I like.

Stevens always makes me think of Nietzsche’s comment that ‘existence can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon’. Stevens was an aesthete. I agree with Yvor Winters that he often wallowed in ennui and indulged in misanthropy … There is little compassion or love for humanity, no real warmth that flows from Stevens. His is all intellect, philosophy, self-reference, and ultimately, nihilism. He failed to perceive that the fusty old carcass myths conceal a beating heart of truth --- and he protested too much against them, with a rigid and styptic conviction. He failed to understand that the only certain or immediate, the only absolute truth available to man is emotional. Keats knew this, plainly.

“The Comedian as the Letter C” irritates me like a bad Hollywood movie about Hollywood. It is a pretentious, verbally garish, onanistic poem largely about poetry, about creating your own aesthetic meaning, and thus it is uninteresting to most anybody except other poets. I think Nietzsche wrote more beautifully and poetically about the subject. I dislike any effort of an artist to make his art into a religion; to worship your own creation is finally to worship yourself, in all your finitude and fallibility, and terminates precisely where it must – there I give the poem credit. Blake and Yeats I think are good counter-examples: they invented elaborate systems or quasi-systems of meaning and mythology, but did not let theorizing about them become the core of their work. Or at least, it’s not their best work. Jarrell was right in signaling Stevens’s great weakness as his addiction to philosophizing – particularly about poetry.


That said, here’s a Stevens poem I admire:

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.


Why do I like this? First, it is concentrated and concise (Elizabeth Bishop: ‘something need not be large to be good’). Next, the language is unpretentiously poetic; the images are concrete and striking. Lastly, it asks a wonderful question, an echo of Milton and Dickinson and Shakespeare and Blake and probably most every great poet or philosopher who ever lived: to what extent is the world ‘my idea’? How, and to what limit, does my thinking, my imagination of the world actually constitute the world? The answer can be neither naïve realism nor the solipsism to which Stevens tends; it’s something somewhere in the middle, somewhere elusive and mysterious. And it is endlessly fascinating, at least to me.

So, Stevens fans – take issue with me. Or agree with me. Or ignore me: post your favorite Stevens poem and tell us why you like it. What do you dislike in it? What don’t you understand? Let’s have a romp with Wallace.

Last edited by Michael F; 02-08-2017 at 07:00 PM. Reason: clean up
Reply With Quote
  #2  
Unread 02-05-2017, 10:56 AM
Andrew Szilvasy Andrew Szilvasy is offline
Member
 
Join Date: May 2016
Location: Boston, MA
Posts: 2,044
Default

I love Stevens--so much of him I carry around always rattling around in my head. Though I concede "Comedian as the Letter C" is not among my favorite.

To pick a favorite is too hard for me: from Harmonium to "Of Mere Being," there is little I don't love. So I'm not picking a favorite here, but just sharing one I love, with but scant commentary, that is not one of the most frequently cited poems:
Anglais Mort à Florence

A little less returned for him each spring.
Music began to fail him. Brahms, although
His dark familiar, often walked apart.

His spirit grew uncertain of delight,
Certain of its uncertainty, in which
That dark companion left him unconsoled

For a self returning mostly memory.
Only last year he said that the naked moon
Was not the moon he used to see, to feel

(In the pale coherences of moon and mood
When he was young), naked and alien,
More leanly shining from a lankier sky.

Its ruddy pallor had grown cadaverous.
He used his reason, exercised his will,
Turning in time to Brahms as alternate

In speech. He was that music and himself.
They were particles of order, a single majesty:
But he remembered the time when he stood alone.

He stood at last by God’s help and the police;
But he remembered the time when he stood alone.
He yielded himself to that single majesty;

But he remembered the time when he stood alone,
When to be and delight to be seemed to be one,
Before the colors deepened and grew small.
Coming after his fallow period, this poem has such power in evoking a naked fear of aging and loss of both potency and poetic power. It feels fresh and personal while not obviously being about him--a quality I think more contemporary poets might take a lesson from.

Last edited by Andrew Szilvasy; 02-05-2017 at 11:25 AM.
Reply With Quote
  #3  
Unread 02-05-2017, 11:14 AM
Michael F's Avatar
Michael F Michael F is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: a foothill of the Catskills
Posts: 968
Default

Andrew, that is indeed splendid. I love the invocation of Brahms for inspiration, for delight. Schopenhauer once said that the Upanishads had been 'the great consolation' of his life. I think I might say J.S. Bach...

Thank you -- and post more if you'd like!
Reply With Quote
  #4  
Unread 02-05-2017, 05:14 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: San Diego, CA, USA
Posts: 8,307
Default

I pity the poor English as a Second Language students who have to struggle with his poems, because even as a native speaker I can rarely squeeze any sense out of what he's doing. (I realize that most of what he's doing has more to do with mood than sense, but often both are lost on me.)

Glad to see your appreciation and reservations, Michael. They both help me feel less daunted.

And thanks for posting that poem, Andrew. I like the way that repetend starts on the bottom of the antepenultimate stanza and then gradually floats to the top of the subsequent stanzas.
Reply With Quote
  #5  
Unread 02-05-2017, 05:57 PM
Allen Tice's Avatar
Allen Tice Allen Tice is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: Brooklyn, NY USA
Posts: 6,119
Default

Michael: "styptic" !! Talk about the best word! Also, since you said it, and it's clear from his images in more than one poem when read closely: "onanistic." Onanism is as legimate a door to perception as some others I suppose, even if it is incomplete in the way a diet of high fructose syrup isn't enough for health. But don't go away, readers, it's not all nihilistic. In a moment I will try to link to some commentary on Stevens I recently came across. Back soon.

https://bigother.com/2010/11/15/boun...itles-stevens/

https://bigother.com/2010/11/15/more...tevenss-poems/

Xxxx

Last edited by Allen Tice; 02-05-2017 at 06:02 PM.
Reply With Quote
  #6  
Unread 02-05-2017, 07:18 PM
Michael F's Avatar
Michael F Michael F is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: a foothill of the Catskills
Posts: 968
Default

Julie, Allen, thanks for chiming in! I hadn’t even noticed your point about the repetend, Julie. And Allen, thanks for pointing out Stevens’s cleverness (beyond dispute) and his sense of humor. I know I stated my reservations strongly in my first post; that is because there is much in the man that I react strongly to, pro and contra. He is a poet I’m compelled to return to, and that in itself says much.

Here’s another one I love, for its simplicity, for the clarity of its images, and for the underlying pathos:


The Brave Man

The sun, that brave man,
Comes through boughs that lie in wait,
That brave man.

Green and gloomy eyes
In dark forms of the grass
Run away.

The good stars,
Pale helms and spiky spurs,
Run away.

Fears of my bed,
Fears of life and fears of death,
Run away.

That brave man comes up
From below and walks without meditation,
That brave man.

Last edited by Michael F; 02-05-2017 at 07:27 PM. Reason: doh! names
Reply With Quote
  #7  
Unread 02-05-2017, 08:04 PM
Allen Tice's Avatar
Allen Tice Allen Tice is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: Brooklyn, NY USA
Posts: 6,119
Default

Another link, a review: nytimes.com/books/97/12/21
Reply With Quote
  #8  
Unread 02-05-2017, 08:39 PM
Andrew Szilvasy Andrew Szilvasy is offline
Member
 
Join Date: May 2016
Location: Boston, MA
Posts: 2,044
Default

Stevens loves the sun and the moon. I think it stems from his dual love of Romanticism and what he knew of classic Chinese poetry.

No Possum, No Sop, No Taters

He is not here, the old sun,
As absent as if we were asleep.

The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.
Bad is final in this light.

In this bleak air the broken stalks
Have arms without hands. They have trunks

Without legs or, for that, without heads.
They have heads in which a captive cry

Is merely the moving of a tongue.
Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,

Like seeing fallen brightly away.
The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.

It is deep January. The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

It is in this solitude, a syllable,
Out of these gawky flitterings,

Intones its single emptiness,
The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

It is here, in this bad, that we reach
The last purity of the knowledge of good.

The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
Bright is the malice in his eye...

One joins him there for company,
But at a distance, in another tree.
Reply With Quote
  #9  
Unread 02-06-2017, 09:19 AM
Michael F's Avatar
Michael F Michael F is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: a foothill of the Catskills
Posts: 968
Default

Allen, that is a very perceptive review with which I largely agree. I particularly like the invocation of the Dionysian; it’s straight out of Nietzsche, and very much Stevens, IMO. The review makes me want to spend more time with the late Stevens, if it is indeed true that he finally knew to eschew “his philosopher’s bow-tie”. I shall have to get on that... I enjoyed that, thank you.


Andrew, another lovely poem of images. It reminds me of the blackbird poem, of course, but it also makes me think of this by Dickinson:

THE SKY is low, the clouds are mean,
A travelling flake of snow
Across a barn or through a rut
Debates if it will go.

A narrow wind complains all day
How some one treated him;
Nature, like us, is sometimes caught
Without her diadem.


Being Wallace Stevens, it seems he can’t help but relate the scene back to poetry and writing, and he seems to see it as an aesthete’s mystical “dark night”. Remarkable. Thank you for posting it.

Last edited by Michael F; 02-06-2017 at 09:38 AM. Reason: clean up
Reply With Quote
  #10  
Unread 02-06-2017, 10:02 AM
Orwn Acra Orwn Acra is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2005
Location: NYC
Posts: 2,336
Default

Stevens is immensely silly. Seemingly by accident (in that so far as I know, there is no indication he ever read Carroll) he builds upon the tradition of Carrollian nonsense to make it right for the new century. This is not so much of a stretch – other grand modernists like Eliot and Joyce acknowledged their debt to Carroll – but whereas the twentieth century’s purveyors of nonsense simple wrote more nonsense without changing the mien of the thing, Stevens brought fresh face. The article Allen links to is great (“He sounds like a man imitating a whole orchestra, not despising the triangle.”) but Stevens is not Lear, a poet whose ragtag whimsy lacks all the logical structures of Carroll and Stevens (when you read Stevens, you start to believe him, no matter how outrageous his presupposition). I await the poet to build on Stevens and provide us with a twenty-first-century strata of nonsense, which I imagine will contain a structured discombobulation of our fractured world.

Two poems I love:

The Search For Sound Free From Motion

All afternoon the gramophone
Parl-parled the West-Indian weather.
The zebra leaves, the sea
And it all spoke together.

The many-stanzaed sea, the leaves
And it spoke all together.
But you, you used the word,
Your self its honor.

All afternoon the gramaphoon,
All afternoon the gramaphoon,
The world as word,
Parl-parled the West-Indian hurricane.

The world lives as you live,
Speaks as you speak, a creature that
Repeats its vital words, yet balances
The syllable of a syllable.

To the Roaring Wind


What syllable are you seeking,
Vocalissimus,
In the distances of sleep?
Speak it.

Last edited by Orwn Acra; 02-06-2017 at 10:06 AM.
Reply With Quote
Reply

Bookmarks

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump



Forum Right Top
Forum Left Bottom Forum Right Bottom
 
Right Left
Member Login
Forgot password?
Forum LeftForum Right


Forum Statistics:
Forum Members: 8,399
Total Threads: 21,839
Total Posts: 270,784
There are 2290 users
currently browsing forums.
Forum LeftForum Right


Forum Sponsor:
Donate & Support Able Muse / Eratosphere
Forum LeftForum Right
Right Right
Right Bottom Left Right Bottom Right

Hosted by ApplauZ Online