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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

Another link, a review: nytimes.com/books/97/12/21

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.

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.

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.

I was planning to post this one here, once I could set aside time to really get into this thread.

Thanks for making this, Michael. Maybe this will finally get me to really delve into Stevens. I love the glimpses I've gotten.

Walter, that's a juicy comment, and a great additional perspective. There's almost something Whitworthian about the first poem you posted -- though I'm not sure John would say he's influenced by Stevens!

Aaron, thanks. I'm learning from this, too -- as I had hoped.

Carry on...

I just had recalled to my mind that I've actually written a short piece about No Possum, No Sop, No Taters, here.

I promise to contribute with more original and responsive thoughts when I can make time.

To elucidate my previous comments: One notable aspect of Carroll’s writing is its play with the so-called arbitrary division between word and object, sign and the signified. Jabberwocky is the most well-known example of this, but we see it, too, in the following dialogue between Alice and the White Knight:

There are many more examples throughout his stories and poems. I said “so-called arbitrary division” because Carroll’s neologisms in Jabberwocky somehow convey their meaning through sound, whereas most words (like table) are arbitrary sonic demarcations of a specific concept. Carroll is able to do this partly because his nonce words are portmanteaux, so in galumphing we get a taste of gallop and triumph and that influences our conception of the word’s meaning; his ingenuity shows more in words like vorpal, which does not have the same blend of connotations, yet still produces a specific image in our mind. This breaking-down of the supposed arbitrariness between word and what the word signifies anticipates De Saussure (and later Wittgenstein) and refutes him.

Stevens uses nonsense sounds in a similar way. [Insert here an inventory of them; there are many but I am away from my books]. These sounds constitute a deconstruction of language into its most primitive and basic forms: baby babble, onomatopoeia, animal sounds. Many of Stevens’ poems deal with an enlightened solipsism (“I was the world in which I walked”), as if one’s inner world cannot be described with regular words (since their sounds convey one meaning) and can only be approximated through sounds that have no meaning, in which the connection between the word and the concept behind the word has not yet formed. “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” said the Austrian homosexual who chose to remain silent while Stevens chose to speak nonsense – both resist saying something rather than court a specific meaning that falls short of what must be expressed but, ultimately, cannot be.

Michael F,

You'll hate me, but I absolutely love The Comedian as the Letter C. I've mentioned on the Sphere several times that I think Stevens' handling of blank verse in that poem is so masterful that I can forgive whatever failings it has. He could write a thousand lines about breakfast cereal and I'd read it.

Oh well, that's my two cents about Stevens.

Just a snippet I really can't get enough of. And remember, I like this not for what it's about, but for how it sounds:

The spring came there in clinking pannicles
Of half-dissolving frost, the summer came,
If ever, whisked and wet, not ripening,
Before the winter's vacancy returned.
The myrtle, if the myrtle ever bloomed,
Was like a glacial pink upon the air.
The green palmettoes in crepuscular ice
Clipped frigidly blue-black meridians,
Morose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn.

This is even better, more Shakesperian:

He came. The poetic hero without palms
Or jugglery, without regalia.
And as he came he saw that it was spring,
A time abhorrent to the nihilist
Or searcher for the fecund minimum.
The moonlight fiction disappeared. The spring,
Although contending featly in its veils,
Irised in dew and early fragrancies,
Was gemmy marionette to him that sought
A sinewy nakedness. A river bore
The vessel inward. Tilting up his nose,
He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells
Of dampened lumber, emanations blown
From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes,
Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks
That helped him round his rude aesthetic out.

Bill,

Hate you?!? Never. And certainly, never never never over differences of opinion on poetry.

I don’t claim to be ‘right’. It could well be that i) to paraphrase Scrooge, I read that poem on a day that I lunched on a bad piece of meat; or ii) I simply don’t get it; or iii) most probably, I look for poetry to do something other for me than what Stevens is doing in that poem. I sincerely respect your views and I would love to hear more from you on what you admire in his work – any of it. I'm sure I'd learn something.

In poetic amity,

M

p.s. I perceive the loveliness in the lines you quote -- specifically, the first 9. I'm less enamored of those that follow.

No, of course I was saying that with tongue in cheek. :D I know you're a class act.

And I think you're "right" insofar as you're voicing your opinion. When you say, "I really hate the taste of peas!", I know you're telling the truth, and you're as right as rain. If you were to say, "Peas taste terrible!", then you might not be as right, because many people like the taste of peas.

I admire so much in Stevens' work it'd be hard to know where to start, and impossible to know when to stop.

Michael,

What do you think of this poem?

I wrote in another thread:

Here's the B I G difference between a poet like Stevens and someone like John Ashbery. Stevens is notoriously difficult, but he doesn't write nonsense. He writes intensely philosophical poems. His work is an examination of what it is to exist, to perceive, to experience. He harps on the same themes over and over, and those themes are very active in the world today. He is wily and tricksy, but his intention is not to confuse, but to examine and contemplate.

[Funny you should mention Hollywood. Stevens would have loved The Matrix. He would have loved The Truman Show]

The typical Ashbery poem is one that appears beautiful, appears full of very important things, said in a very important manner; but ultimately he writes nonsense poems. I think he pretty much admitted to that, if I'm not mistaken? I could very well be wrong. And please don't misunderstand me: He has written some very good poems that are not nonsense; but what he does best — in my opinion — is compose beautiful fakes of the likes of Eliot and Stevens. And he has a flock of wannabes that are not nearly as good at it as he is.

I think it's obvious to everyone who's paying attention that there is a concerted effort by many bright minds in the world to cause confusion rather than work toward understanding. Genesis 11:9 has never been more relevant. Or 1 Corinthians 14:9.

Here are two famous Stevens poems, each having 18 lines. Let anyone who likes, compare and contrast them. Do any of the images seem rhyme- or slant-rhyme driven? Does the duplication of the images (tails, unsoft "feet") seem coincidental or fundamental? Does the meaning of the uncommon word "mort" in the first poem (the sound of a hunting horn made at the death of the quarry, a deer) align with the possibly dead feet in the second poem? Is it appropriate to single out these two poems for random comparison, considering the quantity of poetry Stevens wrote?

The Bird With The Coppery, Keen Claws

Above the forest of the parakeets,
A parakeet of parakeets prevails,
A pip of life amid a mort of tails.

(The rudiments of tropics are around,
Aloe of ivory, pear of rusty rind.)
His lids are white because his eyes are blind.

He is not paradise of parakeets,
Of his gold ether, golden alguazil,
Except because he broods there and is still.

Panache upon panache, his tails deploy
Upward and outward, in green-vented forms,
His tip a drop of water full of storms.

But though the turbulent tinges undulate
As his pure intellect applies its laws,
He moves not on his coppery, keen claws.

He munches a dry shell while he exerts
His will, yet never ceases, perfect cock,
To flare, in the sun-pallor of his rock.


The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

xxxx

Hi Bill,

I am so glad you came back.

Like you, I was initially confused about “The Emperor of Ice Cream” until I read a few explanations of it on the net. And now, I think I understand it, and I do like it. You’re right; Stevens is continually harping on the same themes, those of mortality, denial of the old myths, and of experiencing the world through the senses – the senses, indeed, are Stevens’s gods -- and converting that experience into his own ‘music’ or creed. This is why I call him an aesthete. What I like very much in this one (besides ‘concupiscent curds’, which makes me giggle, and the absence of the bow-tied philosopher) is his stark insistence on the bare finality and nakedness of death. Shine a light on it. 'Let be be finale of seem.' And I'm struck by the contrast between the youth and vitality of S1, and the death in S2. Our life is like ice cream, and for those of us who like ice cream, it can indeed be sweet and delicious. But it melts away, we consume it, it is gone. So, be the emperor of ice cream, for there is no other. There is something almost heroic in Stevens’s obsession with death, his embrace of it, which actually feels more like defiance -- almost like Camus (minus the ethical imperative, which is a huge difference). And like Nietzsche, if you set aside his doctrine of eternal recurrence. I hear very much of Nietzsche in WS.

Last night I was trying to think of a love poem Stevens had written – not love of experience, or love of sensation, but love of a person. I actually googled the subject this morning, since my books are back east, and came up with poems that are mostly restatements of Stevens’s aesthetic ‘religion’, some of which are quite good, like this and this. Can you think of a good Stevens love poem, I mean, to a flesh and blood person, that is not an aesthetic recapitulation? If so, I would very much like to read it.

Again, glad to hear your voice on this thread!

Walter,

I was also thinking about your comments last night. Sounds like you’ve been diving into semiotics. Brave man! Don’t you think portmanteau words are ‘second order’ words that derive their meaning from ‘first order’ words, and, absent onomatopoeia and such, are still arbitrarily related to the signified? Seems to me perhaps they are. BTW, I am a huge fan of 'the gay Austrian' and delighted to see him mentioned.

Also, IIRC, Jarrell had some funny and impatient things to say about WS’s ‘baby talk’. I wish I had my Jarrell at hand, but he wasn’t a fan… I appreciated hearing a different view from you.

Certainly many, probably most, words are arbitrarily related to what they signify. However, I would say that the influence of onomatopoeia is greatly underplayed. One wonders why certain sounds for certain words caught on while others did not. It is no coincidence that in synthetic (agglutinative) languages common words are the shortest. While this is not exactly onomatopoeia (is, for example, does not imitate any sound), the sense and utility shape the sound. Can you imagine having to say "obladobladoblado" when you mean "no"? Our language generally evolves into what is most easy.

Also, yes, portmanteaux are second order words, which is why I am more impressed by vorpal or callooh: non-portmanteau words that convey their meaning through sound.

At university, I was probably alone in thinking that the division between sound and sense, which is the division between sign and what is signified, is not nearly as strong as generally believed. Perhaps I was and continue to be overly poetic. Saussure's response to onomatopoeia was that because different languages imitate sounds differently, the link between sound and sense is weak. His argument, however, doesn't take into account that animal sounds in other languages are remarkably similar and that any variation can be accounted for by each language's unique phonological properties.

In some kind of support of Walter [dba Orwn], I suggest that the average human brain contains many latent neural links between speech areas, muscle memory, and behavior modeling and mirroring areas. If they exist strongly enough, they would tend to shape language sounds into forms most compatable with common behavioral activity sequences. There wouldn't have to be world-wide identity as to the sounds, just tendencies reinforced by local social agreement. Very speculative, but consider how brief the basic terms used for "self" usually are: rarely more than two syllables, often just one.

xxxx

Walter, thanks for your clear and intelligent response. I think you can wear it as a badge of honor if you were/are “overly poetic”. A bit OT, but I’m curious, and this relates to Allen's last comment: did you study Chomsky, and what did you make of his universal grammar theory? I grant you that is a big topic and perhaps needs its own thread…

Aaron, I just got around to your link. Hyperboreans… that jostles something in the attic of my brain. Stevens and Nietzsche as Hyperboreans -- my dear man, I think I buy that.

Allen (referring to your post on a previous page), that’s a challenging project! I’m hoping someone else can take it up. I’m talking too much, I fear.

My sense of Stevens is actually just the opposite, I think, at least based on the few poems I know well (basically just No Possum, No Sop, No Taters and Man Carrying Thing). The Hyperboreans are a mythic race beyond the northern cold. Get past the cold and you find gentle climes, and there the Hyperboreans celebrate.

Stevens, in contrast, seems to content to stop just there, in the cold itself, and sing there. He rejects the idea that one could push further, past the cold, to find something better. No, rather:

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

Extremely provocative, Aaron! Wonderful! I have to run (thankfully, so I'll shut up for awhile), but what do you make of this?

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

Michael, that is one of his best poems.

I wrote a little poem about an imaginary exchange between Robert Browning's ghost and Stevens in a restaurant in 1935. The poem plays on both poets' use of certain exclamatory words, like Browning's "zooks!" (Fra Lippo Lippi), for example, and Stevens' use of things like "huff and hum" and "hullabaloo", and the infamous "Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk."

But, we can't post our own poems in discussion threads. Ask me if you want me to send you a link to it. You might enjoy it, in light of this discussion. I've thought about posting the poem in Metrical, but I'm not terribly interested in asking for critique of it. Decisions, decisions...

I think we need a thread on Browning. Have you read Browning much? If you haven't you certainly must. Don't let yourself die without at least tapping into Fra Lippo Lippi and The Ring and the Book. Sordello you can miss, since no-one understood it except the author, though I love it, and for the same reasons I love The Comedian as the Letter C.

Bill,

I enthusiastically agree with you on this poem. I'm with WS all the way, through tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk, right to the widow's wince.

I have not read much Browning, but on your recommendation, I shall add him to my Urgently Required Attention list, stat. I'd be pleased for you to send me a link by PM to your poem.

M

Wallace Stevens : The Woman in Sunshine

It is only that this warmth and movement are like
The warmth and movement of a woman.

It is not that there is any image in the air
Nor the beginning nor end of a form:

It is empty. But a woman in threadless gold
Burns us with brushings of her dress

And a dissociated abundance of being,
More definite for what she is—

Because she is disembodied,
Bearing the odors of the summer fields,

Confessing the taciturn and yet indifferent,
Invisibly clear, the only love.

(1948: from The Auroras of Autumn)

Clive,

It's a beautiful poem. This thread is reminding me of two thoughts: 1) I need to pick up some Stevens and get reading, and 2) the problem with death is that it cuts off all that reading.

Also, this poem reminds me of Frost's "The Silken Tent."

Certainly, the most important line in this poem is "Because she is disembodied." I'm sure there are a lot of folks out there who might see this line as sexist or even misogynistic in its delivery. And there are those that might see it as nihilistic (I think Mr. Ferris made this point). I like to think there is more animism in Stevens to balance any oblivion out there. But I fear I am projecting my own psychology on him in saying that. Nonetheless, there's an expansiveness in his poems that does not feel like an abyss but an infinite and eternal falling into something greater.

To the bookshelf! Charge!

Cheers,
Greg

PS One of my favorite Stevens' poems is "Peter Quince at the Clavier."
Just a taste:

Beauty is momentary in the mind—
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.

I, too, am a fan of "The Comedian as Letter C", to the extent that I even wrote a long-ish essay on it. I'll just quote one brief passage from that essay, since it fits in well with what William has said above about Browning and Stevens (I like the idea of Stevens meeting Browning's ghost):

Linky is on its way. I am still debating whether or not to post the poem. Bill Carpenter, a friend of mine and someone I trust very highly, suggested that my poem on Stevens and Browning was entertaining but probably not much beyond that.

I'm with W.S. all the way, too. And by all means, please check out some Browning. But avoid the highly anthologized stuff, or at least the songs and tidbits you've seen all over. I suggest Fra Lippo Lippi first, then things like Andrea Del Sarto, and his many longish monologues. The Ring and the Book is an immense tome, and I've barely scratched the surface with that.

But as for Browning's technical powers: he was virtually unrivaled among his contemporaries, except for Tennyson. I'm sure you've read My Last Duchess. There's an excellent line-by-line breakdown of that poem on Youtube, which helps in grasping what the poem achieves.

First, let me say how glad I am that this thread is becoming what I hoped it would – a very interesting discussion of Stevens. Clive, and Gregory, and Gregory, thank you for participating. I have already profited greatly from this discussion.

Clive – lovely poem, indeed. Love poem? You did not say this, but I suspect this is why you posted it; I hope I’m not making an ass of myself by assumption. Anyway, I view it more about the summer day than the woman: “the woman in sunshine” can mean the female or feminine attributes inhering in sunshine, or better said, the way WS is poetically experiencing the sunshine. He likens the balmy sunshine and breeze to a woman in typically Stevens-ish ‘bawdy’ or sensual language. The woman is nameless, and not even addressed directly. And her love is indifferent? That's something of a strange thing to say. The sunshine is indifferent, we probably agree. I read it more as a poem of Stevens’s aesthetic delight in, and desire for the world, and in this case, specifically, the sun on a balmy day. Compare this to the love poems of Auden, which are so personal. Or Yeats, with his love of "the pilgrim soul in you". IMO, we remain in the realm of the senses and the aesthetic. I may be misreading, I readily admit. It is a pastime of mine. But I do sense a big difference.

Gregory P – yes, I linked to “Peter Quince” in one of my previous posts. I like it, too. If I call you Greg, will you call me Mike, or Michael? 'Mr Ferris'? Lord ha' mercy!

Gregory D – IIRC, Jarrell also comments on Stevens’s parodying of other poets, including Whitman. I can’t recall if it is with reference to “The Comedian”, but it may well be. But we agree in general on the nature of the language; I rather less charitably called it ‘garish’. I have less patience with it, for two reasons: to me, it is like honey, and as Shakespeare said, a little more than a little is much too much. But more importantly, parodying or borrowing from previous poets, and using rare and foreign words and the like makes this poem still more a poem that is really only for other poets or critics of poetry; ‘inside’ jokes, and the bow-tied philosopher’s development of his aesthetic theory, constrict the universe of people who can appreciate it to a small one, indeed. Adrian Mitchell once said “most people ignore poetry because poetry ignores most people.” I feel that way about this poem. But as I remarked to Bill, it’s a difference of taste, a difference in desire for what I want poetry to do. I do recall – and I should have said this before to Bill – marking the first 9 lines he quoted in his post as among the most beautiful in the poem. I respect Bill’s opinion, and yours.

I appreciate the exchange of views. I am wrestling with Wallace as honestly as I know how.

Keep romping…

Michael,

I agree that "The Comedian" is never going to have a broad appeal. But once you accept that, there's a lot to enjoy. I certainly find it more immediately enjoyable than, say, most of Pound's Cantos; in Pound's case, if you don't get the allusions you often get nothing. I sometimes don't understand Stevens at all but still enjoy the sound of it... Or just the weirdness of it.

Anyway, thanks for starting this thread, which has been very stimulating.

My favorite long poem of Stevens is Esthetique du Mal, especially the final section.

Gregory, good points, all. No more shade from me for "The Comedian", I promise!

Roger, that's one I haven't read. May I ask why you like it?

Here's why I like it:

The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one's desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair. Perhaps,
After death, the non-physical people, in paradise,
Itself non-physical, may, by chance, observe
The green corn gleaming and experience
The minor of what we feel. The adventurer
In humanity has not conceived of a race
Completely physical in a physical world.
The green corn gleams and the metaphysicals
Lie sprawling in majors of the August heat,
The rotund emotions, paradise unknown.

This is the thesis scrivened in delight,
The reverberating psalm, the right chorale.

One might have thought of sight, but who could think
Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
But the dark italics it could not propound,
And out of what one sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur
Merely in living as and where we live.

You are a practicing physicist, Roger, and you made a fitting selection. Kant said that sense impressions are the only way humans can know anything about the universe. Stevens must have agreed, and accordingly glories in sense data, reasonably giving it first place over speculations about the wan possible "existence" of imagined (by him) non-physical beings of some sort. Which is fine. How can he or anyone do otherwise? What else is possible to the "material girl" (or guy)? Which is my point. You (and I) may revel in the richness of experience, but the limits of our physical structure constantly limit our speculations about the matrix of our experience. It's a small point, and not one to turn many somersaults over. I applaud your choice of a Stevens quote.

This reminds me more than any of the Steven's quoted here of much of Ashbery's work, which is difficult, obscure, but does deal with grand themes and must, I feel, have some sort of "point." Of course the Stevens is easier, but it remains difficult. This makes me want to read a bunch of Stevens now...