Woops! I think I just mixed up Roger Slater with Martin Rocek. Say it isn't so! Which one is the physicist? It's a small point, I know, but things should be kept Euclidean most of the time.

I'm no physicist, though I am made up of a wide array of subatomic particles.

I thank you for your reply, and am, for the moment, mentally heaping dust on my head. Too much Kant can't be good. However, if my faux pas prompted you to get in touch with Martin, that's all to the good. Three heads are better than one in this case, perhaps. My liking of your quote is unstinted.

Thanks, Rogerbob.

That does seems very Stevens, even Ur-Stevens. I’m curious how you read the last three lines of S1. I have my conjecture, in line with my general view...

The green corn gleams and the metaphysicals
Lie sprawling in majors of the August heat,
The rotund emotions, paradise unknown.


[edited in: I'm off to see family for a few days. I hope the romp goes on. I see Clive's post below, and am optimistic!]

Wallace Stevens: Angel Surrounded by Paysans


One of the countrymen:

................................................There is
a welcome at the door to which no one comes?

The angel:

I am the angel of reality
Seen for a moment standing in the door.

I have neither ashen wing nor wear of ore
And live without a tepid aureole,

Or stars that follow me, not to attend,
But, of my being and its knowing, part.

I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.

Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,

Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone

Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings
Like watery words awash; like meanings said

By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not,
Myself, only half of a figure of a sort,

A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition apparelled in

Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?


(Final poem in The Auroras of Autumn, 1949: based on a still life by Tal Coat owned by Stevens and on which he bestowed this title)

Well, this thread has gotten me to pick up my collected Stevens and start working through it, start to finish. Already rewarding me, two poems in. I don't know if there is a deeper meaning to "Earthy Anecdote" beyond the imagery, but the imagery is just marvelous.

And I think "Invective Against Swans" is a clever and amusing satire of bad poetry, about as good as the genre gets, because it is interesting in its own right. I was initially surprised by his decision to place it second in Harmonium, but on reflection I think it works: knowing what I know about the later Stevens, I think this poem's crows are a nice harbinger of the cold which Stevens sang so well. (I expand upon these thoughts here.)

It will continue to reward. Just be wary of anyone telling you that Stevens wrote nonsense. His poems might appear to be nonsensical, but after a bit of unpacking, research, and deep focus, the profundity of it will hit you, like a pillow loaded with dynamite.

Aaron,

I liked your article on Invective Against Swans. I confess I didn't understand the poem, but it seems like you've nailed it. I've probably read it a number of times, but my memory of late, both long and short term, is so bad that I'm almost at the point that every time I revisit a book of poetry, it's like a new discovery. If things get any worse, I'll be able to hide my own eggs for Easter (that's a tasteless joke I heard in my travels as a 30 year worker in caring for the elderly).

I've just begun reading something you wrote about Geoffrey Hill. I can't wait to find out what you think of The Orchards of Syon. That's the only book I have of his. I find some of it fairly easy to unpack, but a lot of it really baffling.

You say you've read 74 books in a year. Holy crap! I'm a terribly slow reader. It took me several weeks to get through Moby Dick, and even longer to get through Middlemarch. It took me years to get through Ulysses, because I had to keep starting over. I simply can't read quickly. I won't know what the hell I'm reading if I try and read too fast. I envy people like you. I have enough books in my Kindle library to last me ten lifetimes, but seeing as I've only got the one, I will die desperately unsatisfied. Ah, well.

Anyway, I've bookmarked your blog.

Thanks, William. I'm glad you liked it.

Geoffrey Hill is on my list of things I'd like to get to this year, though I plan to focus on Stevens and Frost for now.

Most of those 74 books were for my academic studies (I'm in grad school for philosophy of science). I basically spend most of my day reading and writing for that, and then I come home and blow off steam by reading and writing other things.

Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, as they say… I don’t mean to be argumentative, but as I remarked in another thread, this is one of “the truffles” that I can’t help sniffing out when I’m in the woods… it is a subject that fascinates me.

Re: Esthetique du Mal.

I read that section, and S1 in particular, as WS’s assertion that he experiences the world far more intensely than the non-physicals, i.e., believers, theists. I read it as taking the argument in “A High Toned Old Christian Woman” to a new level: it is he, and not they, who experience the paradise of “the rotund emotions”, emotions that would swamp the non-physicals.

I’m troubled by the need to compare. How do you judge what another feels? How do you gauge, compared to your own, the rapture and ecstasy of Hopkins at dappled things, Whitman in the mystical moist night air, or Teresa in contemplation? Or how do you measure comparatively the despair of Dostoyevsky, the anguish of Melville, or the passion of Auden? Might not this be a false dichotomy – especially when you argue, as does WS, that your own ideation and imagination largely determine the world?

For example: what I feel at the opening movement of Tchaikovsky’s 1st Piano Concerto, or Bach’s “Great” fugue in G minor, and – yes! – the lips of the Sun on my skin, or the trill of the wood thrush at dawn. How could I know to rank ordinally the intensity of my feelings compared to those of anyone else? Why should I care to?

I think of this from Miss Emily, who believed and disbelieved “a thousand times a day”, for it kept faith “nimble”:


I taste a liquor never brewed –
From Tankards scooped in Pearl –
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling – thro' endless summer days –
From inns of molten Blue –

When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door –
When Butterflies – renounce their "drams" –
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats –
And Saints – to windows run –
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the – Sun!


Or do I misread?

This thread will be around forever, so maybe I can risk saying that I largely agree with Kant's idea that all of what is known about the external world comes via the senses. However, the "knower" is at first glance inside the intact brain, and, as Stevens surely wondered: how does it know? Examining the quote above, I completely agree.

This thread is recalling my 10 yrs at Talk Freethought (erstwhile Internet Infidels/FRDB).

I agree with you. No-one is privy to another's view of the world, and no-one can see through the other's eyes. As much as some people think it would be fine and dandy if we could, it would have catastrophic repercussions. I argued for a decade with scientists, lawyers, teachers, physicians, you name it, professionals in every field, about these things you touch on. Quite a number of these people I refer to thought it would be a great thing to be able to intervene in a person's brain and literally know what they were thinking. The arguments usually happened in the morality forum. Some defended the notion of this possible, potential, and literal "mind-reading" as a means of crime prevention. All we have to do is find out what goes on in the brain that causes criminal behavior, go in there, and "fix" the problem.

I got into the tragedy of the lobotomy, its widespread acceptance, and eventually got slammed for being an "alarmist." I mentioned Dr. Jose Delgado over and over and over, but only one person offered any critique, and it was a gentle critique: "He lost his objectivity there for a while." was the sum of it. Delgado's (in)famous book is called Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilised Society. He's also famous for this quote:

I'm rambling again, but it's pertinent, I think. I'll answer your last question up there in my response to Allen.

You couldn't, and you shouldn't, IMHO.

I always agreed with the empirical view, until I started to experience certain things that I found inexplicable, and these "things" were happening so often, and in such abundance, that my entire worldview began to wobble into major uncertainty and cognitive dissonance. I began to consider a more subjectivist, rather than objectivist (small 'o') look at things. I had always taken Existence as primary, irreducible, in the Aristotelian sense, but for some reason I began to entertain the idea that maybe some Grand Consciousness was primary.

Was it God, like Spinoza's God—and he was no closet atheist, as his letters prove, nor was he the same as a pantheist, which many assert. Was it time to make a tinfoil hat and fend off the alien mindrays; was it evil spirits; was it Cthulhu, or just bi-polar disorder, which is famous for causing religious mania? I eventually settled on God, with a dash of some kind of mental disorder, since I have been through two care programs and was never diagnosed bi-polar. All I had, according to the first psychiatrist, was "an emotional disorder", and "a drinking problem".

Back to Stevens: I used to have one way of looking at a blackbird. Now I've got, oh, about 42.

(Just kidding about the 42).

Pressing on in Harmonium, and enjoying it immensely (if slowly), here's one that stood out to me.


The Load of Sugar-Cane

The going of the glade-boat
Is like water flowing;

Like water flowing
Through the green saw-grass,
Under the rainbows;

Under the rainbows
That are like birds,
Turning, bedizened,

While the wind still whistles
As kildeer do,

When they rise
At the red turban
Of the boatman.

I think this is my favorite poem by Stevens:



Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit

If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the rooms and on the stair,

Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato’s ghost

Or Aristotle’s skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;

As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.

It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.

It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.

Aaron, the imagery and plain-spokenness of that poem are striking. And Rogerbob, that’s a new one to me -- thank you for posting it.

I’ll take advantage of the bump to thank Bill for his last thoughtful comment and for validating my sanity. :cool:

And Allen: The only (possibly) direct allusion to the great Kant I have heard in WS’s work is in “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman”, about the nave of the moral law, but that’s more the 2nd critique than the 1st. But I haven’t read all of WS, and I may well be missing others... [edited in: On reflection, I think you're probably referring to the general point that sense data is conditioned or determined by the Kantian categories of the understanding, and the Kantian "Copernican Revolution". So, yes, WS is in that lineage, in a manner of speaking.]

Wow, the dynamics of that are really interesting, Rogerbob.

L1's twinned "must" (showing the speaker's helplessness) quickly becomes "let him" (showing the speaker's assertion of godlike control). Note how perfectly the sunlit L3 echoes the "Let there be light" of Genesis.

This, in turn, associates speech itself--whether in Genesis or in this poem--with the power to create the universe anew, as the speaker is now doing, displacing the Creator by not letting Him speak. By L6, even the word "must" itself has transformed from L1's expression of reluctant acceptance into yet another expression of the speaker's verbal power. God's silence becomes implicit acceptance of the universe-ruling narrator's commands.

[I wrote much more on this, but then decided that not everyone will be inclined to sit still for a sermon in the Church of Julie, so PM me if you want a bigger dose of my theological blather.]

I love the poem but never thought about it as hard as you, Julie. I just like the idea of someone who isn't necessarily an atheist, but hopes there is no God. This poem sometimes makes me think of a wonderful barber I had for several years who told me that every morning he prays for two things. First, he asks God for health. Next he asks God to stay out of his business.

You can get a haircut at the Church of Julie, too, but you probably won't like the results.

I should probably take another look at Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning". It's been a while, and I'm a different person since I read it last.

Dear COJ, couldn't one read that much of that poem, maybe all of it, as expressing a fear or discomfort at having a god of some particular size (like a decorative garden gnome) in the house commenting and making remarks at awkward times like a resident mother-in-law or nosy neighbor? I am not theologizing here, just trying to get a sense if the poem. The idea just expressed makes me giggle, and if Stevens didn't want a yapping gnome, I wouldn't either -- unless it was very wise, seldom spoke, and was uncommonly diplomatic. As to his "deaf" god, well that's not a particularly useful god -- with its nose in its newspaper or whatever. This seems to me to be more of an annoyed manifesto than a poem I could care about much. A bit of pique. Almost a rather tedious high school paper editorial tricked up with spelling puns and easy rhetoric. I think, COJ, that your analysis is better than the poem.

Such a god would indeed be pointless, but that's the kind of god that Stevens is asking for in the poem. He would just as soon there not be a god at all, but if there must be one, he's hoping it will stay on the sidelines and not bother us too much. He has no use for a god, and that's an attitude you might not approve of but one that I find appealing.

Roger, it's not a question of whether I approve of such an attitude. Or him. He, or you, may be right.

If by "not a particularly useful god" you mean a god that is not a wish-granting genie, that view seems to mesh pretty well with the theology of many of the Founding Fathers of the U.S. See Wikipedia's description of Deism, and in particular the section on Deism in the United States.

I understand more than not granting wishes, Julie. My own view, which I know is not widely shared and which I don't even know if Stevens agrees with, is that God is of no use at all distinct from the uses of literature and poetry and myth, i.e., stories we tell each other that give us insight, comfort or understanding. And what I'm hearing in this Stevens poem is the idea that too much focus on the idea of God can disturb a more direct relationship we have with the observable and actual universe we find ourselves in, that the metaphor can impinge on the reality, and that there's something about the direct and observable reality, unadorned by theological invention, that is worth experiencing and appreciating without having to pin everything on some sort of divine entity that gives it meaning. I relate it to the portion of Esthetique du Mal that I posted above, that the worst tragedy is not to be physical in the physical world, etc.

Dear COJ, this two- or three- or more way badminton rally is averting our more-or-less adoring eyes from Wallace Stevens, so I will say that "that" wasn't microscopically what I meant, and swivel back to the thread. Please return unopened any umbrage that might have accidentally fallen into your shopping cart. Umbrage is rare and valuable like perfumer's musk, and, though a renewable resource like outrage, it is too precious to waste on my maunderings.

Roger, oddly I read you loud and clear. For the most part, much of the time.

Sorry, Allen. I didn't mean to cause offense, and it honestly hadn't occurred to me to take any.

I mentioned deism only because it seemed relevant to the poem Rogerbob posted, and (I thought) to your comment about a god's (or a belief system's) usefulness. I'm not a deist myself, but deism was definitely significant in New England, and Stevens came from an old New England family.

In retrospect, I realize that my flippant "wish-granting genie" remark sounds more sarcastic than neutral. [Longer-than-necessary explanation deleted. Better to just briefly apologize than to make excuses.]

Anyway, I sincerely apologize. Back to Wallace Stevens's theology.

Roger, just out of curiosity, are you familiar with Spinoza? I'm sure you've heard that when Einstein was asked if he believed in God, his famous response was, "I believe in the God of Spinoza."

Naturally, much has been made of that quote, and Einstein himself explained himself, but there's no need to go into that (unless you'd like to, in which case I'm game), since I'm more interested in Spinoza than Einstein at the moment.

Lots of people still insist Spinoza was a closet atheist, and there's much good reason for people to think that, being as the man's life was in danger all the time, once his beliefs were made public, and especially after his excommunication from the Jewish community in Amsterdam.

My reason for believing that he was not an atheist lies more in my reading of his letters than in any of his other writings, save for his extraordinarily unique and perceptive interpretations from the Bible, both old and new testaments. He actually got quite impatient with a few people who flatly misunderstood his ideas, especially those who accused him of atheism.

You'd have to read all through the Ethics at the very least, and a good deal of his other writings, particularly the Theologico-Political Treatise, to really get a grip of him.

Spinoza's God isn't one that creates the world and then retreats, without interest, like the Deistic God, or the Aristotelian Prime Mover. He's an ever-active, ever-creative entity; He's in all things, in all places, in all times.

In my travels I've encountered too many people who are turned off from reading Spinoza due to over-exposure to overly-simplified summations of his thought. As I say this, I should also say I won't be the least surprised to hear that you know far more about Spinoza than I do. I have found, so many times, that it's never a good idea to be presumptuous.

Back to Stevens: I don't think WS is necessarily saying he "has no use for a god." I am more in agreement with Julie, if I understand her right.

We shall see.

Michael F, it looks—to steal something John Whitworth said of his recent thread—as if you've created the thread that "will not lie down". How jolly!

:D

Julie, the problem with communicating in text is that 90% of the tone of the message is suppressed, and we have to infer too much. I wondered if you were annoyed with me, and you guessed that I was annoyed with you. I am definitely not. Long story short, not everything Stevens wrote interests me. Wherever he gets preachy, I get worried. The occasions when he is very slick and preachy too are when I distrust him most.

Rogerbob, your post #63 brought to mind another piece of Walt that is glued to my brain:

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I who am curious about each am not curious about God,
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and
about death.)


And then follows this, which Bill might also like:

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least

Sounds like Khalil Gibran. Wow. Preachy, like Whitman on a windy weekend.

This is not much of a puzzler.


Negation

Hi! The creator too is blind,
Struggling toward his harmonious whole,
Rejecting intermediate parts,
Horrors and falsities and wrongs;
Incapable master of all force,
Too vague idealist, overwhelmed
By an afflatus that persists.
For this, then, we endure brief lives,
The evanescent symmetries
From that meticulous potter's thumb.

**

Edited: I don't entirely agree with the author of the Wikipedia article about this poem. Leastways not this:

I don't see a 'bungling' potter in the poem. I see a meticulous one. "Incapable" doesn't necessarily mean 'bungling." There's also "harmonious."

Maybe he's right, but it's preachy. Dull. Admits no response apart from agreement or rejection. Not for me. Bronx cheer.

Bill, thanks for that and for the link. I’m pleased to see the reference to Zarathustra, which has come to my mind several times regarding WS. What strikes me about the poem is (again) how easy it is to read also in relation to writing poetry, to WS’s aesthetic philosophy.

Allen, I may have to start a thread on Whitman this Spring when I’m back with my books. I place him with Miss Emily and Melville on the central pedestal of American literature. I positively adore those lines...

I think no Stevens thread would be complete without “The Idea of Order at Key West”, one of his later poems and IMHO one of the more clear and engaging developments of his ‘creed’. There is very much I like in it, even if I can’t quite bring myself to join the church.


The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

I think there's plenty of room for rumination in the poem.

I at first took it as a nod to evolutionary theory, what with "blind" - in which case "bungling" would be apt. Then as a reference to the Prime Mover, or the God of deism. It could even refer to Spinoza's conception of God.

The "Hi!" is a fantastic way to start a poem. Does anyone think it's anything similar to the opening ejaculation of Beowulf?

(Excuse my filthy talk.)

"I mentioned deism only because it seemed relevant to the poem Rogerbob posted, and (I thought) to your comment about a god's (or a belief system's) usefulness. I'm not a deist myself, but deism was definitely significant in New England, and Stevens came from an old New England family."

Julie, Stevens's immediate forbears were from Pennsylvania. He got interested in his family backgrounds late in life, so there may have been a New England connection generations back. Stevens grew up in the Dutch Reformed church.

I have read this thread infrequently. Has Santayana been mentioned? And through Santayana, Lucretius? It's always seemed to me that Stevens's philosophy begins and ends in aesthetics. If it is a philosophy, it's predominantly a personal one--a single artist's way of confronting the world, a church of one.

Funny you should mention Santayana, since I almost mentioned him while I was mentioning Spinoza.

Santayana is a good catch, Sam. I haven't read The Sense of Beauty, so I leave it to others to draw out the parallels and echoes.

Wrt "the church of one", I substantially agree. I brought up WS's tendency to solipsism earlier in the thread. 'Reality' is not infinitely malleable by human consciousness, I don't think. WS sometimes writes as if it were. And, not to get too deep into the philosophical woods, but I characterized Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence as 'silly' earlier in the thread; I have deleted that adjective because it's not silly when you look at how it functions in N's philosophy: it's connected to amor fati, or love of fate. I think there is something similar going on in WS -- I mean the act of will.

My knowledge of philosophy is so spotty that I probably shouldn't even be commenting here. However, I have been reading Stevens, without much help from critics, for a long time. American lyric poets, at least early on, had a special relationship to Nature, simply because there was so much nature to write about. It starts with Freneau ("The Wild Honey-Suckle"), informs much of Bryant ("The Yellow Violet," "To the Fringed Gentian"), and runs through Emerson ("The Rhodora"). These "flower poems" are unique to American poets; the Brits might look at a bunch of daffodils but not at the individual flowers in the way that a naturalist would. That tradition runs through Williams ("Queen Anne's Lace") down to Wilbur ("On Misidentifying a Wildflower"). You could add a few things by Frost, Swenson, Bishop, and Oliver to the mix. These poems generally combine sharp observation and description with some kind of moral imperative; Wilbur called his own area "Mr. Bryant's homiletic woods."

Stevens doesn't seem especially interested in the details of nature "red in tooth and claw" or otherwise. "The Snow Man" is about an aesthetic object (if it's really about a snowman); "Bantams in Pine Woods" is about selectively bred fighting cocks with wonderfully evocative names. In these, the hand of man has "shaped" nature. "The Idea of Order at Key West" could have been written at any seaside place, though it happened to take place in Florida. The "natural" things in it are not very specific--sea, land, and sky, but the woman's song makes them "synch," binding them together in an aesthetic act, an epiphany, if you will, not for the singer but for the hearer(s) of the song.

For my money, "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman" is one of his best; it's not just speculation, it's rhetoric--language shaped into effective argument. It's also a very funny poem if you get the joke. Too many of Stevens's poems seem to be private jokes, to be "got" by the poet alone; this one isn't.

Stevens came of age in a time when philosophy was in unusual ferment. Determinism (aided by science), pragmatism, and Nietzsche were in the mix, to which you could add modernist aesthetics. He was a young man from the "sticks" at Harvard and was doubtless impressionable and impressed. One can never quite account for how and why and where the aesthetic sensibility arises (Reading, PA?), but it does in these "pure products of America," roughly a one-in-a-million shot, I'd say. Who'd have thought that the invention that changed and still changes world history would have issued from a bicycle shop in Dayton, OH?

William, thanks for the praise of my website. It's very hard, given my expansive nature, for me to not ramble on and on and spray every hydrant on Eratosphere, but that website shows me trying to be minimal. Thanks again. A lot of Stevens to me is very flat, even doctrinaire. Just my grumpiness.

For my money, "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman" is one of his best; it's not just speculation, it's rhetoric--language shaped into effective argument. It's also a very funny poem if you get the joke. Too many of Stevens's poems seem to be private jokes, to be "got" by the poet alone; this one isn't.

ITA on "A High-Toned...".

Also, re: the private jokes: IMHO -- just my opinion, offered as such -- too many of WS's poems are about poetry. That's a temptation for us all, but most poets I consider superior to WS, e.g., Dickinson, Whitman, Frost, Szymborska, Auden... resisted it. That's my personal aesthetic!

[edited in: To Aaron, below: so we need threads on Whitman and Auden! Something to look forward to...?]

One day someone will explain to me what there is to enjoy in Auden. (There are a few I enjoy. But reading his selected poems was a pretty dull trudge for me.)