wallace stevens (1879-1955)

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry

Wallace Stevens


Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Images from Stevens’ World: People

David Levine’s Stevens




Images from

Stevens’ World: People

Elsie Stevens





Stevens: Father and

Grandfather





Stevens in His Prime





Stevens at the Office





Stevens the Poet





Stevens: The Poet as Old

Man


Stevens’

Hartford


Stevens’ Hartford

Wallace Stevens, “Adagia” (from Opus Posthumous)

Each age is a pigeon-hole. (157) Life is an affair of people and not of places. But for me life is an

affair of places and that is the trouble. (158)After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence

which takes its place as life's redemption. (158) The imagination wishes to be indulged. (159)Poetry is not personal. (159)The real is only the base. But it is the base. (160) Weather is a sense of nature. Poetry is a sense. (161) All poetry is experimental poetry. (161)It is the belief and not the god that counts. (162) The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself. (162) The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a

fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth of belief is to know that is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly. (163)

The exquisite environment of fact. The final poem will be the poem of fact in the language of fact. But it will be the poem of fact not realized before. (164)


Wallace Stevens, “Adagia” (from Opus Posthumous)Each age is a pigeon-hole. (157) Life is an affair of people and not of places. But for me life is an

affair of places and that is the trouble. (158)After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence

which takes its place as life's redemption. (158) The imagination wishes to be indulged. (159)Poetry is not personal. (159)The real is only the base. But it is the base. (160) Weather is a sense of nature. Poetry is a sense. (161) All poetry is experimental poetry. (161)It is the belief and not the god that counts. (162) The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself. (162) The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a

fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth of belief is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly. (163)

The exquisite environment of fact. The final poem will be the poem of fact in the language of fact. But it will be the poem of fact not realized before. (164)

We live in the mind. (164)



Money is a kind of poetry. (165) It is not every day that the world arranges itself in a poem. (165) The death of one god is the death of all. (165)In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes

the place of imagination. (165)A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman. (165) Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real

and what is imagined are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet. (166)

Realism is a corruption of reality. (166)I don't think we should insist that the poet is normal or, for that

matter, that anybody is. (166) When one is young everything is physical; when one is old

everything is psychic. (167) The tongue is an eye. (167)



Money is a kind of poetry. (165) It is not every day that the world arranges itself in a poem. (165) The death of one god is the death of all. (165)In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes

the place of imagination. (165)A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman. (165) Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real

and what is imagined are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet. (166)

Realism is a corruption of reality. (166)I don't think we should insist that the poet is normal or, for that

matter, that anybody is. (166) When one is young everything is physical; when one is old

everything is psychic. (167) The tongue is an eye. (167)When the mind is like a hall in which thought is like a voice

speaking, the voice is always that of someone else. (168)



The body is the great poem. (168) Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully. (171)Eventually an imaginary world is entirely without interest. (175) I have no life except in poetry. No doubt that would be true if my

whole life was free for poetry. (175)There is a nature that absorbs the mixedness of metaphors.

(176) There is nothing in the world greater than reality. In this

predicament we have to accept reality itself as the only genius. (177)

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor. (179) Imagination is the only genius. (179) In the long run the truth does not matter. (180)


Wallace Stevens

The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives--if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary. Like light, it adds nothing, except itself.Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel


Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man”One must have a mind of winterTo regard the frost and the boughsOf the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long timeTo behold the junipers shagged with ice,The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to thinkOf any misery in the sound of the wind,In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the landFull of the same windThat is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,And, nothing himself, beholdsNothing that is not there and the nothing that is.


Wallace Stevens, “The Emperor of Ice Cream”

Call the roller of big cigars,The muscular one, and bid him whipIn kitchen cups concupiscent curds.Let the wenches dawdle in such dressAs they are used to wear, and let the boysBring 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 sheetOn which she embroidered fantails onceAnd spread it so as to cover her face.If her horny feet protrude, they comeTo show how cold she is, and dumb.Let the lamp affix its beam.The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.


Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (74) IAmong twenty snowy mountains,The only moving thingWas the eye of the black bird.

December 1917


Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird III was of three minds,Like a treeIn which there are three blackbirds.


http://www.merriam-webster.com/

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird IIIThe blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.It was a small part of the pantomime.


Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird IVA man and a womanAre one.A man and a woman and a blackbirdAre one.


Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird VI do not know which to prefer,The beauty of inflectionsOr the beauty of innuendoes,The blackbird whistlingOr just after.


Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird VIIcicles filled the long windowWith barbaric glass.The shadow of the blackbirdCrossed it, to and fro.The moodTraced in the shadowAn indecipherable cause.


Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird VIIO thin men of Haddam,Why do you imagine golden birds?Do you not see how the blackbirdWalks around the feetOf the women about you?


Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird VIIII know noble accentsAnd lucid, inescapable rhythms;But I know, too,That the blackbird is involvedIn what I know.


Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird IXWhen the blackbird flew out of sight,It marked the edgeOf one of many circles.


Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird XAt the sight of blackbirdsFlying in a green light,Even the bawds of euphonyWould cry out sharply.


Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird XIHe rode over ConnecticutIn a glass coach.Once, a fear pierced him,In that he mistookThe shadow of his equipageFor blackbirds.


Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird XIIThe river is moving.The blackbird must be flying.


http://www.merriam-webster.com/


Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird XIIIIt was evening all afternoon.It was snowingAnd it was going to snow.The blackbird satIn the cedar-limbs.

Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”

IComplacencies of the peignoir, and lateCoffee and oranges in a sunny chair,And the green freedom of a cockatooUpon a rug mingle to dissipateThe holy hush of ancient sacrifice.She dreams a little, and she feels the darkEncroachment of that old catastrophe,As a calm darkness among water-lights.The pungent oranges and bright, green wingsSeem things in some procession of the dead,Winding across wide water, without sound.The day is like wide water, without sound,Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feetOver the seas, to silent Palestine,Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.



IIWhy should she give her bounty to the dead?What is divinity if it can comeOnly in silent shadows and in dreams?Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or elseIn any balm or beauty of the earth,Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?Divinity must live within herself:Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;Grievings in loneliness, or unsubduedElations when the forest blooms; gustyEmotions on wet roads on autumn nights;All pleasures and all pains, rememberingThe bough of summer and the winter branch.These are the measures destined for her soul.



IIIJove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.No mother suckled him, no sweet land gaveLarge-mannered motions to his mythy mind.He moved among us, as a muttering king,Magnificent, would move among his hinds,Until our blood, commingling, virginal,With heaven, brought such requital to desireThe very hinds discerned it, in a star.Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to beThe blood of paradise? And shall the earthSeem all of paradise that we shall know?The sky will be much friendlier then than now,A part of labor and a part of pain,And next in glory to enduring love,Not this dividing and indifferent blue.



IVShe says, "I am content when wakened birds,Before they fly, test the realityOf misty fields, by their sweet questionings;But when the birds are gone, and their warm fieldsReturn no more, where, then, is paradise?''There is not any haunt of prophecy,Nor any old chimera of the grave,Neither the golden underground, nor isleMelodious, where spirits gat them home,Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palmRemote on heaven's hill, that has enduredAs April's green endures; or will endureLike her remembrance of awakened birds,Or her desire for June and evenings, tippedBy the consummation of the swallow's wings.



VShe says, "But in contentment I still feelThe need of some imperishable bliss.''Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreamsAnd our desires. Although she strews the leavesOf sure obliteration on our paths,The path sick sorrow took, the many pathsWhere triumph rang its brassy phrase, or loveWhispered a little out of tenderness,She makes the willow shiver in the sunFor maidens who were wont to sit and gazeUpon the grass, relinquished to their feet.She causes boys to pile new plums and pearsOn disregarded plate. The maidens tasteAnd stray impassioned in the littering leaves.



VIIs there no change of death in paradise?Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughsHang always heavy in that perfect sky,Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,With rivers like our own that seek for seasThey never find, the same receding shoresThat never touch with inarticulate pang?Why set the pear upon those river-banksOr spice the shores with odors of the plum?Alas, that they should wear our colors there,The silken weavings of our afternoons,And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,Within whose burning bosom we deviseOur earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.



VIISupple and turbulent, a ring of menShall chant in orgy on a summer mornTheir boisterous devotion to the sun,Not as a god, but as a god might be,Naked among them, like a savage source.Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,Out of their blood, returning to the sky;And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,The windy lake wherein their lord delights,The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,That choir among themselves long afterward.They shall know well the heavenly fellowshipOf men that perish and of summer morn.And whence they came and whither they shall goThe dew upon their feet shall manifest.



VIIIShe hears, upon that water without sound,A voice that cries, "The tomb in PalestineIs not the porch of spirits lingering.It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.''We live in an old chaos of the sun,Or an old dependency of day and night,Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,Of that wide water, inescapable.Deer walk upon our mountains, and quailWhistle about us their spontaneous cries;Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;And, in the isolation of the sky,At evening, casual flocks of pigeons makeAmbiguous undulations as they sink,Downward to darkness, on extended wings.


Wallace Stevens, “To the One of Fictive Music”

Sister and mother and diviner love,And of the sisterhood of the living deadMost near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom,And of the fragrant mothers the most dearAnd queen, and of diviner love the dayAnd flame and summer and sweet fire, no threadOf cloudy silver sprinkles in your gownIts venom of renown, and on your headNo crown is simpler than the simple hair.

Now, of the music summoned by the birthThat separates us from the wind and sea,Yet leaves us in them, until earth becomes,By being so much of the things we are,Gross effigy and simulacrum, noneGives motion to perfection more sereneThan yours, out of our own imperfections wrought,Most rare, or ever of more kindred airIn the laborious weaving that you wear.


Wallace Stevens, “To the One of Fictive Music”

For so retentive of themselves are menThat music is intensest which proclaimsThe near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom,And of all the vigils musing the obscure,That apprehends the most which sees and names,As in your name, an image that is sure,Amoung the arrant spices of the sun,O bough and bush and scented vine, in whomWe give ourselves our likest issuance.

Yet not too like, yet not so like to beToo near, too clear, saving a little to endowOur feigning with the strange unlike, whence springsThe difference that heavenly pity brings.For this, musician, in your girdle fixedBear other perfumes. On your pale head wearA band entwining, set with fatal stones.Unreal, give back to us what once you gave:The imagination that we spurned and crave.


Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.The water never formed to mind or voice,Like a body wholly body, flutteringIts empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motionMade constant cry, caused constantly a cry,That was not ours although we understood,Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.The song and water were not medleyed soundEven if what she sang was what she heard.Since what she sang was uttered word by word.It may be that in all her phrases stirredThe grinding water and the gasping wind;But it was she and not the sea we heard.



For she was the maker of the song she sang.The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured seaWas merely a place by which she walked to sing.Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knewIt was the spirit that we sought and knewThat we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the seaThat rose, or even colored by many waves;If it was only the outer voice of skyAnd cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,However clear, it would have been deep air,The heaving speech of air, a summer soundRepeated in a summer without endAnd sound alone. But it was more than that,More even than her voice, and ours, amongThe meaningless plungings of water and the wind,Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heapedOn high horizons, mountainous atmospheresOf sky and sea. It was her voice that madeThe sky acutest at its vanishing. ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry


She measured to the hour its solitude.She was the single artificer of the worldIn which she sang.And when she sang, the sea,Whatever self it had, became the selfThat was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,As we beheld her striding there alone,Knew that there never was a world for herExcept the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,Why, when the singing ended and we turnedToward the town, tell why the glassy lights,The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,As night descended, tilting in the air,Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.



Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,The maker's rage to order words of the sea,Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.


Wallace Stevens, “The World as Meditation”

Jai passé trop de temps á travailler mon violon, á voyager. Mais l’exercice essential du compositeur—la meditation—rien ne l’a jamais suspendu rn moi . . . Je vis un reve permanent, qui ne s’arrivéte ni nuit ni jour.

George Enesco

It is Ulysses that approaches from the east,The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended.That winter is washed away. Someone is moving

On the horizon and lifting himself up above it.A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope,Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells.

She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him,Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.

The trees had been mended, as an essential exerciseIn an inhuman meditation, larger than her own.No winds like dogs watched over her at night.ENGL 3370: Modern American Poetry

The World as Meditation (ctd.)

She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone.She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklaceAnd her belt, the final fortune of their desire.

But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sunOn her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart.The two kept beating together. It was only day.

It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met,Friend and dear friend and a planet's encouragement.The barbarous strength within her would never fail.

Wallace Stevens, “The World as Meditation”


Wallace Stevens, “A Quiet Normal Life”

His place, as he sat and as he thought, was notIn anything that he constructed, so frail,So barely lit, so shadowed over and naught ,

As, for example, a world in which, like snow,He became an inhabitant, obedientTo gallant notions on the part of cold. It was here. This was the setting and the timeOf year. Here in his house and in his room,In his chair, the most tranquil thought grew peaked

And the oldest and the warmest heart was cutBy gallant notions on the part of night—Both late and alone, above the crickets’ chords, Babbling, each one, the uniqueness of its sound.There was no fury in transcendent forms.But his actual candle blazed with artifice.


Wallace Stevens, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”

Light the first light of eveningIn which we rest and, for small reason, thinkThe world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawlWrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.


Within its vital boundary, in the mind.We say God and the imagination are one...How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,We make a dwelling in the evening air,In which being there together is enough.

Wallace Stevens, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”


Ariel was glad he had written his poems.They were of a remembered timeOr of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sunWere waste and welterAnd the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were oneAnd his poems, although makings of his self,Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.What mattered was that they should bearSome lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,In the poverty of their words,Of the planet of which they were part.

Wallace Stevens, “The Planet on the Table”


wallace stevens (1879-1955)

Documents

poet major american

prime major american

office major american

wallace stevensimages

old man major american

stevens world

purpose of poetry

experimental poetry