[Michael F]

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.