[Alex Pepple]

Dorianne has been away on conferences & suggested I post something. So, I’m jumping at the chance. Here's something that deals with the issue of modernist abstraction/obscurity. I believe there’s a thread elsewhere on Eratosphere dealing with abstraction.

The proponents of abstraction believe that it can lead uniquely and freshly back to reality even as the artist refuses to permit figuration, sometimes, using strange forms of expression. They keeps trying to "transform abstractions into 'things',” to quote Stevens. With Stevens, we find poetry pre-occupied with psychology – attempting to use language to induce a psychological condition or state of mind.

Indeed, Wallace Stevens’s poetry is known to be difficult, at times inaccessible because of the peculiar ways he tends to use familiar words & his rather dry imagery. However, this poem, one of my favorites from Stevens, is more accessible, & he echoes in places his beliefs about abstraction.

Cheers,
...Alex

----

Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly


Among the more irritating minor ideas
Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home
To Concord, at the edge of things, was this:

To think away the grass, the trees, the clouds,
Not to transform them into other things,
Is only what the sun does every day,

Until we say to ourselves that there may be
A pensive nature, a mechanical
And slightly detestable operandum, free

From man's ghost, larger and yet a little like,
Without his literature and without his gods . . .
No doubt we live beyond ourselves in air,

In an element that does not do for us,
so well, that which we do for ourselves, too big,
A thing not planned for imagery or belief,

Not one of the masculine myths we used to make,
A transparency through which the swallow weaves,
Without any form or any sense of form,

What we know in what we see, what we feel in what
We hear, what we are, beyond mystic disputation,
In the tumult of integrations out of the sky,

And what we think, a breathing like the wind,
A moving part of a motion, a discovery
Part of a discovery, a change part of a change,

A sharing of color and being part of it.
The afternoon is visibly a source,
Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm,

Too much like thinking to be less than thought,
Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch,
A daily majesty of meditation,

That comes and goes in silences of its own.
We think, then as the sun shines or does not.
We think as wind skitters on a pond in a field

Or we put mantles on our words because
The same wind, rising and rising, makes a sound
Like the last muting of winter as it ends.

A new scholar replacing an older one reflects
A moment on this fantasia. He seeks
For a human that can be accounted for.

The spirit comes from the body of the world,
Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world
Whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind,

The mannerism of nature caught in a glass
And there become a spirit's mannerism,
A glass aswarm with things going as far as they can.

--Wallace Stevens

[SteveWal]

This is a terrific poem - I don't know if I completely understand it yet, or ever will, but it makes me think. I love the way it flows, the rythmns, and the language. I shall think more about this.

[Brett Thibault]

Rather than considering abstraction solely as an obscure means to an end, like a vehicle to carry one to never-never land and then back to reality as suggested, I believe Steven’s writing embraces alternative conceptions. One might consider an abstraction a description, through language or other medium, of things apart from concrete existence, an archetype that depends on intrinsic form instead of chronological grounding or pictorial emblem. I find Stevens’s poems more a heuristic expedition than an inducement of fugue, though meditative is a word I would use to describe his work as well.

One way to think about the structural capabilities of such an approach is to recognize a hierarchy in the language of Stevens’s poems, and the manner in which he develops his abstractions, rather than concentrating on the line or sentence alone, and following that, literal translation. If one thinks of explanation as occurring high on a hierarchical ladder, and exemplification as occurring low, one obtains a simple but useful tool for use in reading the complex descriptions of events and phenomena contained in Stevens’s poems. I find his writing moves quite far up the ladder, and then very far down, the scope expansive within the written words, but becoming ever more meaningful and therefore understandable by being linked to increasingly specific depictions of reality.

This particular poem is also one of my favorites, and I consider it one of his finest expeditions—this in opposition to considering it a kind of manifesto.

BT

[Golias]

What a lot of BS! Stevens at his best is neither abstract nor obscure. Viz:

TEA

When the elephant's ear in the park
shriveled in the frost
and the leaves on the path
ran like rats,
your lamplight fell on shining pillows
of sea-shades and sky-shades
like umbrellas in Java.

As Prof. Mezey wrote of an equally fine Larkin poem, there is here..."nothing much to paraphrase, to explicate, to be clever about. The poem reads you, to see if you know, and feel, and can keep quiet."

G.

[Brett Thibault]

Hey, Golias—backatcha. I love these bolster-quotes you guys are so fond of, it’s like putting words in someone else’s mouth and then pretending they support your point.

Switching the poem under consideration is a neat little trick, but it becomes meaningless when one doesn’t share your sensibilities in terms of “his best”. Okay, so you’ve never looked into structural linguistics, so what. Got right into the poem Alex posted above did you, or is this you keeping quiet?

Brett

[Kate Benedict]

The poem in question is indeed very "difficult" -- as much, I think, because of its willfully torqued, baroque grammar as for its infinite "abstractions." Perhaps torqued, baroque grammar is a byproduct of one's interest in structural linguistics? I long to be enlightened.

I could be way off, but I see this as literary surrealism -- the literary equivalent of Magritte's paintings, a poem which gives Magritte's Man in the Hamburg a voice.

As I read it (with my usual irreverence), the voice says the following:

-- The sun is said to "think" things away
-- Until we say something to ourselves, we live beyond ourselves, in air
-- This air is an element which does something that we do better
-- That "something" is unspecified but we do it better than air. It's a big thing, so big the poet can only tell us what it is not, i.e., not planned for imagery or belief and not a masculine myth. (The sun thinks and the air doesn't plan.)
--Now the air is described in plainer terms, as a transparent element birds fly through. Duh.
--They fly or "weave" through the air without a sense of form. (So what.)
-- Now the voice gets a little excited and starts listing things using nominative "what" constructions. What we know, what we see, what we feel, what we are! What we think involves wind-like breathing and a part of motion that moves, and discovery inside of discovery, and change inside of change, and sharing, no, becoming part of color. I've never taken acid, but I imagine it imparts this type of insight.
--Then we're back in real time, a certain afternoon. But we're not in the real world for long. The afternoon is a source, a visible source, wide, "irised," too wide and irised to be more than calm. (Say what?)
--The afternoon is a lot like thinking and nothing like thinking. Instead it's meditation, a daily majesty of such. Unless the antecedent for meditation is "thought" and not the "afternoon." Impossible to tell. For some reason, this type of non-thought is compared to a parent or patriarch, though the point is made earlier in the poem that this is not a masculine myth.
--More imagery about thought processes now, more fluidity. Thought like the sun whether it shines or not, thought like the ever-blowing, ever-rising wind, and this thought-wind makes a sound, though not much of one for it is likened to the sound of winter's end, a muting sound. This wind must be rather cold, and especially chilling to human words, for it necessitates that those words don a mantle.
--Well, the poem admits it: this is all a fantasia. A fresh young scholar will reflect upon it. Like all young scholars, he seeks an accountable human being.
--The acid wears off. Mr. Homburg begins to assess things more studiously. Spirit comes from the world, the body of a world, that is. This body has laws, blunt things, which make of mind an affectation. Nature too is plagued by mannerism. Still, the speaker acknowledges that Homburg's interpretations may be provisional ("...Or so Mr. Homburg thought).
--Provisional or not, Homburg is a sort of scientist. He's captured all of nature in a glass where nature's mannerism has become spirit's mannerism. Look closely. The glass is aswarm with things going as far as they can.
----------

This is gobbledygook. The emperor of ice cream wears no clothes, at least here.

Magritte will survive it. I'm not sure about poetry, for this type of writing has spawned.

[RCL]

Possibly a parody of Emersonian transcendentalism? Maybe he has in mind Emerson's "words are things. Or nothings" (with the pun on no things)? Whatever, it's non-sense.

------------------
Ralph

[Clive Watkins]

Kate is broadly right, in my view.

This is a poor poem to offer as representing Stevens’s capacities - which are more various than is sometimes supposed, both formally (including metrically) and in wider aesthetic terms. He wrote much and was, I suspect, not always the best editor of his own works, too often allowing poorly finished pieces to survive. (He was not even, perhaps, a very good reader of his own proofs, as a study of his texts reveals.)

He nonetheless wrote some wonderful poems - many, it is true, not "easy reading", however.

Kate also remarks that "this type of writing has spawned". Perhaps so. Unintelligent imitators produce unintelligent imitations. Sadly, sometimes imitator and imitated are the same person, a plight to which Stevens himself was not immune.

Clive Watkins

[A. E. Stallings]

Stevens, alas, mostly leaves me cold, as here. I am quite willing to grant his mastery. I only wish I could get as much pleasure out of reading him as others seem to. Perhaps it will come with time...

This might just as easily be placed under metric mastery, you know, as is mostly in iambic pentameter (sometimes strictly so, sometimes loosely, save the last line and a few other places). (or possibly I am just scan-happy?)

Thanks for posting.

Alicia

[Kate Benedict]

And thanks for visiting us at FV!

Lest my tirade give the wrong impression, I do admire much of Stevens. Sunday Morning, The Idea of Order at Key West, Sea Surface Full of Clouds, three widely anthologized poems of his, have provided food for thought and much delight. His imagery can be amazing and, as Alicia points out, his work is often metrical, at base. Good beat; you can dance to it.

I always like this one, which, like so much of Stevens, seems to linger on the border of eternity and the moment.


THE HOUSE WAS QUIET AND THE WORLD WAS CALM

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
the house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a clam world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.