April 22, 2007
National Poetry Month: Wallace Stevens
A fascinating man - the fact that he was a Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, along with a vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. He had a 9 to 5 job the entire time he was writing these amazing poems. He felt dead when he was at his job ... and yet once his fame had reached him, and he was offered professorships at Harvard - he turned it down. An interesting choice, not very common among poets. I love his stuff - I can't say I "get" it all the time, but I comfort myself that that was Stevens's point. He didn't write to be understood, not necessarily. He wrote to express, describe, contemplate ... There's a perfection in his descriptions (the following poem - his first big break as a poet - is a great example). It's not like you are looking at a picture - that he is presenting you. It's like somehow his language has brought you inside. It's unexpected - as most sensoral experiences are. Things aren't literal, when you get into the realm of experience. A scent of somethign may spark off a completely unrelated memory ... or a snatch of music heard makes you remember a golden slant of light from when you were four years old. The senses merge, blend, come apart, merge again. I love his stuff.
Sunday Morning
1
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem 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 feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.
2
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In 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 unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.
3
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-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 desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem 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.
4
She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return 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 isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.
5
She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.
6
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set pear upon those river-banks
Or 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 devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
7
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their 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 fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feel shall manifest.
8
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is 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 old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
"No. 7 of Sunday Morning is, as you suggest, of a different tone, but it does not seem to be too detached to conclude with. The words "On disregarded plate" in No. 5 are, apparently, obscure. Plate is used in the sense of so-called family plate. Disregarded refers to the disuse into which things fall that have been possessed for a long time. I mean, therefore, that death releases and renews. What the old have come to disregard, the young inherit and make use of." -- Wallace Stevens, letter to Harriet Monroe, 1915
"I didn’t know him as anything but a lawyer and a business executive [in 1931, when Taylor, an experienced surety lawyer, began working in the Hartford Accident and Indemnity’s Insurance Department in New York] … To him [gallery going] was just part of life. And Stevens enjoyed life. I don’t care what aspect of it, he enjoyed it. A few times we’d go over to some concert in the Times Square area: he used to like Stravinsky, and we’d go to some Stravinsky concerts over there. I don’t think we ever went to a musical. I don’t think we ever went to a play. He enjoyed things from Forty-second Street north to the Carlyle Hotel, and in between there were bistros and there were galleries; this, that and the other. This is mostly on the East Side, up and down Madison Avenue. Sometimes he’d come down and he’d just walk around by himself. He loved to walk. [Once] he was walking down Madison Avenue, looking at the antique stores. This particular one was closed. He called me Monday morning , said he’d been [to New York from Hartford] Saturday, and he saw this lamp. He recognized it as a choice piece of pottery, porcelain I guess it was, and some kind of fancy shade on it. He wanted to know if I could go up there that day and see if I could buy it for him. So I went up and the price on this little old table lamp was two hundred dollars. That was a lot of money in the thirties. 'Oh, good God!' he said, but he sent the two hundred dollars down. He said, 'Make them pack it well, and they’ll have to pay the cost of the shipping.' And they did; they were probably darn glad to get two hundred dollars. …" -- Wilson Taylor
"It is easy to suppose that few people realize on that occasion, which comes to all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time, that is to say: not merely see it, but look at it and experience it and for the first time have a sense that we live in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there - few people realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings." -- Wallace Stevens, "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet"
"The imagination is the liberty of the mind ... It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction." -- Wallace Stevens
"… He said he enjoyed Havana very much, but the thing he enjoyed most was the climate, nature, the sky, the natural aspect. Not the city, the tropics. And the air. He said he thought the air in Cuba had something very special about it. And I said, "Are you saying about the air something similar to what is said in The Tempest? It’s a wonderful description of the air in the Bahamas. There’s something soft and sweet about the air." He said, "Yes, and how funny that you should talk about The Tempest," because obviously he was remembering that, too. He always talked with nostalgia about the South and south Florida. And the climate, too. Of course, this is typical of the people who live in the cold country, but to him it was not going to Florida or going to Havana to get away from the cold. It was something sensuous in his appreciation of being in Florida: what he felt in the skin. He said that [there] you live with your senses more than when you live in a cold place. This has to do with his poetry; it was part of his personality." -- José Rodríguez Feo
"I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office." -- Wallace Stevens, in a letter to Elsie Moll before their marriage, Jan. 13, 1909
"Reading one's friends' books is a good deal like kissing their wives, I suppose. The less said about it, the better." -- Wallace Stevens
"I've read them of course, but I have to keep away from Eliot or I wouldn't have any individuality of my own." -- Wallace Stevens, when asked what he thought of Eliot's "4 Quartets"
"It is hard to imagine a more astonishing debut in "Poetry". Each line and each sentence is transparently clear, each image alive, the voices that speak are heard to speak. The difficulty only arises if we seek to paraphrase, because the poem as a whole is a process that cannot be reduced to a single meaning or set of meanings. It has taken us from a lawn, a late breakfast, a woman beginning a languid Sunday out of doors, through meditations on meaning, to a known wilderness." -- Michael Schmidt on Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning" - his first professionally published poem, 1915
"It is possible to read Stevens for years with intense pleasure and never to care what the poems mean because the sense of sense is so strong and the movement of emotion so assured." -- Michael Schmidt
"...a Keatsian allegiance is the clue ..." -- Donald Davie
"... an Edward Lear poetic, pushed toward all limits." -- Hugh Kenner
"From one end of the book to the other there is not an idea that can vitally affect the mind, there is not a word that can arouse emotion. The volume is a glittering edifice of icicles. Brilliant as the moon, the book is equally dead," -- Percy Hutchison in The New York Times (August 9, 1931) reviewing Stevens' first collection - now considered one of the greatest works of American poetry.
"I can well believe that [Whitman] remains highly vital for many people. The poems in which he collects large numbers of concrete things, particularly things each of which is poetic in itself or as part of the collection, have a validity which, for many people, must be enough and must seem to them all opulence and elan. For others, I imagine that what was once opulent begins to look a little threadbare and the collections seem substitutes for opulence even though they remain gatherings-together of precious Americana, certain to remain precious but not certain to remain poetry. The typical elan survives in many things. It seems to me, then, that Whitman is disintegrating as the world, of which he made himself a part, disintegrates. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry exhibits this disintegration. It is useless to treat everything in Whitman as of equal merit. A great deal of it exhibits little or none of his specific power. He seems often to have himself to write like himself. The good things, the superbly beautiful and moving things, are those that he wrote naturally, with an extemporaneous and irrepressible vehemence of emotion." -- Wallace Stevens, letter to Joseph Bennett, 1955
"I think I should select from my poems as my favorite the Emperor of Ice Cream. This wears a deliberately commonplace costume, and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it." -- Wallace Stevens, letter to William Rose Benet, 1933
"Dear Janet:
I-The First time he came to the hospital, he expressed
a certain emptiness in his life.
His stay then was two weeks.
Two weeks later, he was in, and he asked the sister to send for me.
We sat and talked a long time.
During his visit this time, I saw him 9 or 10 times.
He was fascinated by the life of Pope Pius X,.
He spoke about a poem for this pope whose family name
was Sartori--- ( Meaning tailor)
At least 3 times, he talked about getting into the fold--
meaning the Catholic Church.
The doctrine of hell was an objection which we later
got thru that alright.
He often remarked about the peace and tranquility that
he experienced in going into a Catholic Church and
spending some time. He spoke about St. Patrick's Cathedral
in N.Y..
I can't give you the date of his baptism.
I think it might be recorded at the hospital.
He said he had never been baptized.
He was baptized absolutely.
Wallace and his wife had not been on speaking terms for
several years.
So we thought it better not to tell her.
She might cause a scene in the hospital.
Archbishop at the time told me not to make his (Wallace's)
conversion public, but the sister and the nurses on the
floor were all aware of it and were praying for him.
At the time--I did get a copy of his poems and also
a record that he did of some of his poems.
We talked about some of the poems.
I quoted some of the lines of one of them and he was
pleased.
He said if he got well, we would talk a lot more and
if not--he would see me in heaven.
That's about all I can give you now.
God's Blessing
Father Hanley
-- A letter from Father Arthur Hanley to Professor Janet McCann, dated July 24, 1977 - about Stevens' alleged deathbed coversion to Catholicism
More information on the wonderful Wallace Stevens here.
Other National Poetry month posts
Posted by sheila | TrackBack