Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Ferris
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.
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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.