[SteveWal]

Stevens had promoted some thoughts in me.

Maybe the real division in poetry is not so much between metrical and free verse as between realism and abstraction.

Many of Stevens' poems can't be pinned down in the way Kate tries to do, any more than a painting by, say, de Kooning can be pinned down. Or a piece of purely instrumental music.
You can call it Padtoral Symphony and people will have images of fields and hills because you call it that. But it's not "about" that in the way that a piece of prose has a subject. It evokes feelings and images in the listener; not an arguement. And probably a different set of images for each reader or listener; or no images at all to some.

I think Stevens is at his best a very serious, but also very playful poet. He's exploring the language, seeing what it can do. He's using language in the way an abstract artist uses paint.

A realist poet, on the other hand, may do some of this, but in the end their real purpose is to tell a story, relate an experience, tell you something.

I don't think everything's quite as divided as that; lots of poets combine the two methods. I know I do. At one extreme, we have the Language Poets so-called for whom poetry seems to have no referent in the world outside the poem. At the other extreme, we have poets whose language is so bald, it could join the Marines, but which is definitely about something.

Just a few random thoughts.

Steven Waling

[This message has been edited by SteveWal (edited August 09, 2001).]

[Robert J. Clawson]

RCL uses "Emersonian." I find that exact. As I read the piece, I thought, "This is a splendid essay."

Not to say that otherwise Stevens isn't a masterful poet. I'd be happy to post the requisite dozen Great Poems, the litmus test, yes?

Bob

[robert mezey]

I don't think I want to get involved in this (I
wandered into this room by accident in any case),
but I'm glad Alicia pointed out that the first
Stevens poem, a sample of free verse mastery, is
not in free verse at all but in meter; and so is
The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
for that matter. Perhaps his greatest poem,
Sunday Morning, is in the strictest iambic
pentameter. A good example of his mastery in
"free verse" is The Snow Man---a wonderful
poem, often misinterpreted.
And like any good poet, he can't be blamed for
those he has influenced. Ashbery, a poet I find
mostly frivolous and unbearably cute, derives from
him in part, but so does Donald Justice

[Tim Murphy]

Not just Justice, but Richard Wilbur, whose first book is very influenced by Stevens. This poem, though, folks, is blank verse and not even very loose pentameter at that. Except for the last line, which follows a very old convention, conclude with a hexameter to give the closure weight. Lovely poem.

Frankly, to see this in the Free Verse forum reminds me of a story I heard from Dana Gioia. When he was doing his post-grad at Harvard one of his Professors lectured for an hour, explaining how "Speech After Long Silence" is one of the great examples of Yeats' free verse: (from memory)

Speech after long silence. It is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,
The curtains drawn against unfriendly night,
That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of art and song.
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom. Young
We loved each other and were ignorant.

Of course it's envelope Q's of pentameter, but the great Modernists are often wrongly enlisted in the cause of free verse.

[Brett Thibault]

I think Mr. Waling provides a good general analogy in that it begins to flush the gradient contrast between vocation and desire.

To me, poetry is indivisible, it is not a quantity; I discard the definitions that propose division, and think of it more as the art of interpreting ideas through our faculties. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with writing; writing is a tool in the box.

This proposed art is universal, given the faculties of course, and is mercurial and valid as laughter or loneliness, for example. To believe that there’re separate means to an end may be valid in perceptive contexts, but because the ultimate, desirable end is congruent makes the argument superficial, and therefore laughable.

Please don’t misinterpret what I’m saying. In other words, I think there’s validity in the conjecture that there is a division between “realism” and “abstraction”, I just have no way of quantifying this difference, as I have no way of quantifying poetry or anything else that might be possible beyond the limits of our perception.

Thinking of poetry in this regard, as the result of ultimate communication, puts the means in a secondary, though important position. The physical manifestation becomes a kind of foreplay in a sense. I don’t mean to scale it in the context of tactile sense, but in a more ubiquitous arena, something that surrounds us all.

Regarding some posts, name-dropping and self promotion in this context looks like a child’s tactic.




[This message has been edited by Brett Thibault (edited August 21, 2001).]

[Marti Opdenbrow]

Ahem. As a "newbie" to this site, and a lover of words rather than one at all educated in literature, I like the poem, whether or not I entirely understand the author's intent in every word. Perhaps for the same reasons I love a good Steve Vai guitar solo while others hear screeching noise void of musical artisanship.
Comments regarding whether it has been "correctly" interpreted seem to me rigid at best. Free verse by it's very nature is open to interpretation. One either finds something that opens to him or opens something within him. Or not. I do especially like the last three lines, but I'm not sure if the "glass aswarm with things" is itself contained.
Newton thought he had the universe all interpreted and wrapped up in laws.....have ya read any Steven Hawking lately?!! The entire world in reality is open to interpretation, so why not our or others written perceptions? Brett makes sense to me.