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  #1  
Unread 09-06-2006, 03:30 AM
MacArthur MacArthur is offline
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Valley Candle

My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
The beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.


It is almost a shame to begin with "Valley Candle", a poem which has become overly-familiar. But it IS a great poem.

Wallace Stevens may be as close as America has ever come to producing an Aesthete. Theoretically, most of the interminable, boring sludge he produced in later years was some kind of hermetically obscure contention for the aesthetics of Astheticism - a thesis propounded in the dull Blank Verse of most of his later poetry.

Of the hundreds of poems Stevens is known to have written, about a dozen are home-runs over the back fence, and the rest are tediously long innings at bat for strike-outs. Few poets are so divided between inevitable anthology pieces, and forgettable misses. Who else can it so truly be said of - "all aces, or spaces"?

A 19th century poet like Tennyson might have been satisfied with a modest claim, such as "loveliness" redeems almost any poem - but a Twentieth century blowhard like Stevens needed to lecture on some topic as, say, "Art Rules!", then deliver up such monumental bores as "The Idea of Order at Key West" or "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction".

What IS good comes almost entirely from his first book, "Harmonium":

Earthy Anecdote
The Plot Against the Giant
The Snow Man
Metaphors of a Magnifico
Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, Et Les Unze Milles Vierges
Valley Candle
The Emperor of Ice Cream
Disillusionment at Ten O'Clock
Peter Quince At The Clavier
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

What is NOT a good poem (throughout) is "Sunday Morning" - which contains only seven beautiful lines, in closing, after reams of verse as uninteresting as anything Stevens penned outside of "The Comedian in the Letter C".

And then just a few things in the collections which came after: "Anglais Most A Florence", "Loneliness In Jersey City", perhaps a couple of others.

What went wrong? We won't know. Taking a ten-year hiatus DIDN'T help. Remaining so isolated from the literary world DIDN'T help. Remaining in a cold marriage, and a bourgeois lifestyle DIDN'T help. Taking up a metrical practice would appear to have been disastrous.

Few of Steven's really good poems are in meter. They are in Free Verse. And his early practice was really Symbolist - his latter poems were merely "difficult". Empty allegories, void of real situations or incidents.

Oh well, we have those dozen. Let's close with the Stevens who loved loveliness:

…Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.



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  #2  
Unread 09-06-2006, 04:23 AM
oliver murray oliver murray is offline
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Mac,

A genuine question from someone who genuinely doesn't know, not an opinion. WHAT is it that makes "Valley Candle" a great poem?

"Sunday Morning" is over-long for my taste, but I think it has a fine opening as well as a beautiful close.
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  #3  
Unread 09-06-2006, 05:16 AM
MacArthur MacArthur is offline
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The most truthful answer is that I don't know...and that if I knew, it WOULDN'T be a great poem, but merely a good one.
"Valley Candle" is a kind of Universal Wrench...it turns a lot of screws and nuts. You can do a lot of things with it - that is what makes this poem so god damn useful...and this is the way in which poems are useful. They make so much of more of our imagination available.

What more can you ask?

(Let's face it....if after all the talking was done, if you felt that you had reached the end of Shakespeares - or even if you believed that SOMEONE, someday, would reach the end or Shakespeare - would you respect the Bard more, or less?)
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  #4  
Unread 09-06-2006, 11:41 AM
oliver murray oliver murray is offline
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I don't ask anything, Mac. You don't know WHY it's a great poem and if you did it WOULDN'T be a great poem. That still doesn't make it a great poem, though.

F.R.Leavis held there were only four great novelists in English; Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and Henry James. (Interestingly, two were women, and the other two weren't English.) This puts the bar for greatness pretty high, maybe too high. he didn't admit Dickens, though he agreed Hard Times WAS a great novel, and may have admitted Dickens later and, certainly, D.H.Lawrence was under consideration. Moral seriousness was one of Leavis's main criteria for greatness. What are yours? Aestheticism, possible range of potential meanings, rhythms, word choices? Or do a number of eminent critics have to hold it to be great? I have no idea, as I only read the poem for the first time a couple of years ago, and it left me pretty much where it found me, although I like the image of a great darkness etc. This doesn't stop it being great, of course, but it does make me wonder what "great" is.
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  #5  
Unread 09-06-2006, 02:22 PM
MacArthur MacArthur is offline
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Multi-valence, in a concise space, is certainly why "Valley Candle" is a great poem.

To begin with, you are given some staples of Romantic poetry: a valley, a candle, the night, a wind. So far you are about where Edgar Allen Poe might have taken twice as many lines to tell you.

Details are smuggled in everywhere. The valley is immense. The candle is, or was, alit. The night is articulated in "beams", which are "huge" - therfore the night must also be "huge" (huger?). "until" suggest that the wind hasn't always been blowing.

A fair amount of information, in a brief space.

But, although "answers" are suggested, none are compelled. It is natural to assume the candle was blown out - but it may have flared and begun a forest fire. It may simply have bent its flame with the wind...and therfore have become a different candle, in the same way Heraclitus' river is ever and always a different river.

It is natural to assume that, after the candle blew out, the "image" of the candle persists. But it is possible to surmise that the "image" of the candle only existed as a "project" of an actor, and then - when some "wind" blew - the actor felt compelled to FOLLOW up, erecting an actual candle in the immense valley...reversing the sequence of Steven's recounting. Or BOTH could be simultaneous - in many theories of perception, object and image are parallel.

It is no small matter that "beams" applies more naturally to the (presumed) light shed by a candle, rather than the (presumed) darkness that inheres in "night".

Compare this to the way such incident-as-allegory is handled by previous poets. Arnold TELLS you all about what the tide on "Dover Beach" is supposed to suggest.

In Frost's "Stopping By The Woods..." it's pretty reasonable to assume that the woods are the World, they belong to God, the Speaker is a Poet who would prefer to contemplate, but the Speaker is a person who must continue on his journey, that "sleep" is Death, and "evening" is old age etc.

AND NO OTHER INTERPRETATION IS POSSIBLE...apart from a vastly improbable assumption that the piece is an entirely pedestrian recounting of meaningless incident.

And this may "leave you where it found you"...poems can do that, I suppose, depending on what kind of person you are.

[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited September 07, 2006).]
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  #6  
Unread 09-07-2006, 03:24 AM
MacArthur MacArthur is offline
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Oh Oliver

RE the Frost masterpiece, I forgot that the impatient horse would be the Body, blindly pushing on toward extinction.

If you really need an extended analogy, check the Frost sonnet comparing a Woman to a big ol' tent - silken, of course - which needs to be tied down with guy-wires...but not too tight, least the winds tear the tent irreperably.

Ah - it is to Wisdom such as this, that we turn to poetry!
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