Wallace Stevens

[Angeline]

At the risk of sounding like Jerry Seinfield: So what's the deal with Wallace Stevens?

I met the poetry of Wallace here thanks to the inimitable Annaswirls. She challenged us to write poetry inspired by Steven's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Some (like Harold Bloom, for example) count him among the major twentieth-century American poets (along with TS Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost). Others find him too difficult and unnecessarily arcane.

1201 has challenged me (more than once!) to explicate Stevens' poetry. I get the impression that he (Mr. 12) has a reaction to him similar to Yeats: he appreciates the poetry but isn't really a fan--feel free to disagree or explain if I have that wrong, 12.

I find his poems at once difficult and appealing. HarryHill noted the appeal of Stevens' sonics and phrasings here.

I'm in no position to analyze his poems, but I'm trying to learn. His poetry is typically abstract and (while I wouldn't call him exactly a philosophical poet) meditative, strongly influenced by his beliefs about perception and reality. He was also, in his later writings apparently, increasingly influenced by modernism and the abstract expressionism of artists like Picasso and Klee.

I'll be posting some of his poems here. If anyone wants to explore them, too, feel to jump in, share, argue, distract as the spirit moves you.


The Snow Man
Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

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

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

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

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

 

[bogusagain]

1201 has challenged me (more than once!) to explicate Stevens' poetry. I get the impression that he (Mr. 12) has a reaction to him similar to Yeats: he appreciates the poetry but isn't really a fan--feel free to disagree or explain if I have that wrong, 12.

I'm in no position to analyze his poems, but I'm trying to learn. His poetry is typically abstract and (while I wouldn't call him exactly a philosophical poet) meditative, strongly influenced by his beliefs about perception and reality. He was also, in his later writings apparently, increasingly influenced by modernism and the abstract expressionism of artists like Picasso and Klee.

I can't say if you are right or wrong about 12 but my suspicions you are you are right. My problem with modernists and maybe 12 has a similar problem but no doubt he will turn up and say I'm wrong, is that the medium is the message. At one time, about 35 years ago I would have said, the medium should be the message but I was just out of college then.

Now I have a mind of my own and think, while the medium is important, what you say is also important. I've got nothing against blackbirds and they are relevant creatures and I wouldn't want a world without them but one can dwell on ornithology too long and they are the subject of an affluent man with nothing much else to worry about. OK I am being flippant but I have just read quite a few of his poems before I wrote this and yes, I probably didn't give them enough time but they didn't initially grab me.

 

[theognis]

I don't consider Stevens to be anything more than a middling poet, at the very best. I've read numerous poems here I consider far better than anything of his I've read. Including a few of yours, Angeline.

 

[Angeline]

I can't say if you are right or wrong about 12 but my suspicions you are you are right. My problem with modernists and maybe 12 has a similar problem but no doubt he will turn up and say I'm wrong, is that the medium is the message. At one time, about 35 years ago I would have said, the medium should be the message but I was just out of college then.

Now I have a mind of my own and think, while the medium is important, what you say is also important. I've got nothing against blackbirds and they are relevant creatures and I wouldn't want a world without them but one can dwell on ornithology too long and they are the subject of an affluent man with nothing much else to worry about. OK I am being flippant but I have just read quite a few of his poems before I wrote this and yes, I probably didn't give them enough time but they didn't initially grab me.

I didn't like Stevens at first and, were I to pick a poet to love according to my politics, it would not be a guy who spent his non-poetry life writing actuarial tables. Of course if I went by politics I wouldn't love Neruda, either, so I try to separate the two. It's not always easy to do that though...

I'm especially interested in your reaction as a visual artist. I'm not one and I know that poets who are also painters, etc., see poems, especially those about or influenced by visual art, in a way I can't. I can't really judge whether I agree with you about how Stevens uses the medium in his message. For one thing, I can't think of another poet to compare him with in that context. Maybe if I had some examples (hint, hint), I could try. Overall though I believe (from my reading) that Stevens' main interest was the idea of how to apply order to what he perceived as chaotic reality. I'm currently trying to understand how modernism and abstract expressionism play into that. Maybe it doesn't much matter for my purposes.

Like I said I'm a relatively recent fan. I got more interested in his poetry after reading of his influence on another poet I admire, Ted Berrigan. I don't think Stevens is an accessible poet (which maybe puts people off him at first), but the more I read, the more I like him. He definitely has had to grow on me.

And yeah you're flippant but I consider it one of your charms. It's definitely a quality that works in your poems.

I don't consider Stevens to be anything more than a middling poet, at the very best. I've read numerous poems here I consider far better than anything of his I've read. Including a few of yours, Angeline.

Thank you. I don't agree but I sure appreciate the compliment!

 

[Angeline]

The Emperor of Ice Cream
Wallace Stevens

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring 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 sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

 

[theognis]

The Emperor of Ice Cream
Wallace Stevens

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring 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 sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

You have many poems far better than this Stevens poem. I'm dead serious. Many.

 

[greenmountaineer]

One time I parsed "Sunday Morning," and thought I got it. It felt like a NY Times crossword puzzle on Sunday, but I thought I got it.

I re-read it several months later, didn't like it, and maybe I didn't get it then or the first time I read it and thought I got it.

 

[theognis]

Okay, I've been reading more of your poetry, Angeline. Wallace who?

 

[bogusagain]

Stevens uses the medium in his message. For one thing, I can't think of another poet to compare him with in that context. Maybe if I had some examples (hint, hint), I could try.

I suppose I mean, the struggle of self, the symbolism and the fracturing and disorientation within the poem, is in fact, the poem's messsage.

I suppose my poem Alien Nation in the 2013 challenge thread is a modernist poem but if I'm honest, I prefer the post modern and maybe 1201 will forgive in saying I think many of his poems are post modern, self knowing and aware they are poems and aware of the artifice within them and the theft and borrowing of other poetry and/or prose and texts.

In fact, I think most poetry written on these threads is modernist or tries to be modernist. Most of mine is too but that is because I am lazy. Don't take that for me saying modernist poetry is lazy, of course I'm not, I'm just refering to myself being lazy. When I am not lazy, I write something like this.

It's easier to illustrate what modernist poetry isn't than is. (in my book) No doubt 1201 will turn up and put me right, since he obviously has a reservoir of knowledge and experience while I just have a puddle.


a 21st century adventure

decisiveness is of the essence so I toss a coin for advice
there is none so I play this like a wee gee board
sitting at my desk staring into the idiot eye
like a seer into a crystal ball
a medium involved in the conjuring up of ghosts
a constant mooning of faces across electronic window panes
the dull hum of dislocated humanity

my motives were this poem of increasing uncertainty
something I could hope to achieve but would I?
this simple meta-knocking on a stranger's door
"Hello! Come in, sit down, make yourself at home."
why this particular door?
that’s what this poem is about
"You must be the freak who's stalking me!"
it's well kept but still an unremarkable door!

"A lot of information but who are you?" I ask
"That's a pretty general question!" you reply
OK you're disgruntled but I've stopped flicking sites
and your insistence on analysis slaps like a teacher's rule
because you're wondering if a) I didn't read your page
or b) I read it and decided it was superficial
or c) I read it and have a specific question."

I'm a summoner of spirits out of the oracle
you're unimpressed and with your twisted logic you accuse
a Canadian sailor with a kayak fetish
somewhere adrift off the coast of Newfoundland
of being a perfectionist and needing to get it right first time
some stooge joker who mocks the futility of work
I sift through the evidence and collate the facts

 

[Angeline]

I suppose I mean, the struggle of self, the symbolism and the fracturing and disorientation within the poem, is in fact, the poem's messsage.

I suppose my poem Alien Nation in the 2013 challenge thread is a modernist poem but if I'm honest, I prefer the post modern and maybe 1201 will forgive in saying I think many of his poems are post modern, self knowing and aware they are poems and aware of the artifice within them and the theft and borrowing of other poetry and/or prose and texts.

In fact, I think most poetry written on these threads is modernist or tries to be modernist. Most of mine is too but that is because I am lazy. Don't take that for me saying modernist poetry is lazy, of course I'm not, I'm just refering to myself being lazy. When I am not lazy, I write something like this.

It's easier to illustrate what modernist poetry isn't than is. (in my book) No doubt 1201 will turn up and put me right, since he obviously has a reservoir of knowledge and experience while I just have a puddle.


a 21st century adventure

decisiveness is of the essence so I toss a coin for advice
there is none so I play this like a wee gee board
sitting at my desk staring into the idiot eye
like a seer into a crystal ball
a medium involved in the conjuring up of ghosts
a constant mooning of faces across electronic window panes
the dull hum of dislocated humanity

my motives were this poem of increasing uncertainty
something I could hope to achieve but would I?
this simple meta-knocking on a stranger's door
"Hello! Come in, sit down, make yourself at home."
why this particular door?
that’s what this poem is about
"You must be the freak that's stalking me!"
it's well kept but still an unremarkable door!

"A lot of information but who are you?" I ask
"That's a pretty general question!" you reply
OK you're disgruntled but I've stopped flicking sites
and your insistence on analysis slaps like a teacher's rule
because you're wondering if a) I didn't read your page
or b) I read it and decided it was superficial
or c) I read it and have a specific question."

I'm a summoner of spirits out of the oracle
you're unimpressed and with your twisted logic you accuse
a Canadian sailor with a kayak fetish
somewhere adrift off the coast of Newfoundland
of being a perfectionist and needing to get it right first time
some stooge joker who mocks the futility of work
I sift through the evidence and collate the facts

Thanks for the explanation and the poem (which is a great read btw). Funny thing is that most online literary sources I found list all the poets I mentioned in my first post (along with poets as different as Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein and Allen Tate) as modernists. This makes me wonder if the term is ascribed as much to a period of time as it is to the components you suggested (loss of self, symbolism, disorientation, etc.) The former definition doesn't really help, but when I use yours well I'm not sure Stevens fits the category. I am beginning to think of him as a mystic in the way Yeats was: developing a belief system (based on various traditions as well as his own ideas) that crops up over and over in the poems. Stevens in similar although his belief system has more to do with counting and categorizing (which makes sense given his career) as a way to bring order to chaos.

 

[Angeline]

One time I parsed "Sunday Morning," and thought I got it. It felt like a NY Times crossword puzzle on Sunday, but I thought I got it.

I re-read it several months later, didn't like it, and maybe I didn't get it then or the first time I read it and thought I got it.

I feel there is something there that I'm reaching for, trying to understand that will help me become a better poet. But I know what you mean: I feel like I'm trying to crack a code or learn a new language. And for me, in jazz terms, it's like differentiating between Lester Young and Charlie Parker. Lester was more straightforward, a melodic line player, but Parker turned it inside out and went to a completely different place. I want to go to a completely different place or at least understand it enough to weave it into my writing.

 

[Angeline]

The theme is clearest in the first four lines

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

 

[champagne1982]

The Snow Man
Wallace Stevens

I like the patterns in the poem, the setup - so to speak.

Line 1 - s1: winter, s2: cold, s3: January
Line 2 - s1: frost, s2: ice, s3: wind
Line 3 - s1: pines, s2: spruces, s3: leaves

Then s4 is about the wind and s5 discusses sounds and use of the other senses.

Even inside the different examples on this thread, I see sonic patterns even if there's no real visible indications that there are repeats. I blame clever enjambment and the assumptions made by Stevens that his audience is not going to be harshly critical when he reuses an image or word simply because we insist that he meant to do that.

 

[Angeline]

The Snow Man
Wallace Stevens

I like the patterns in the poem, the setup - so to speak.

Line 1 - s1: winter, s2: cold, s3: January
Line 2 - s1: frost, s2: ice, s3: wind
Line 3 - s1: pines, s2: spruces, s3: leaves

Then s4 is about the wind and s5 discusses sounds and use of the other senses.

Even inside the different examples on this thread, I see sonic patterns even if there's no real visible indications that there are repeats. I blame clever enjambment and the assumptions made by Stevens that his audience is not going to be harshly critical when he reuses an image or word simply because we insist that he meant to do that.

Well hi there girlfriend. I'm happy to see you in this thread (and here, period). You always have a new, interesting perspective to add. You immediately caught on to a big piece of what is entrancing me about Stevens' writing: the repetitions of reinforcing images and rhetorical patterns. It's a different way (at least for me) of constructing lines, one that I want to better understand. And I think Stevens was a pretty insular kind of person. I doubt he worried over what others thought of his writing. He lived mostly quietly as a business executive and didn't receive acclaim as a writer until quite late in his career.

I'm glad you're weighing in on my obsession du jour.

 

[Angeline]

Words to live by

Dana Gioia is a businessman and public servant who is also a poet. I'm not sure how much his poetry is influenced by Wallace, but he does reference Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird in his essay, Thirteen Ways of Thinking About The Poetic Line.

You should read this essay. Yes, you. I'm generally anti-tattoo but am thinking of having his words tattooed on my back, except I wouldn't be able to see it without mirrors and then wouldn't it be backwards anyway? Ahem.

Really read it. It's lucid succinct advice about writing poetry. Maybe I'll just use it as my template when people ask for feedback.

 

[bflagsst]

It's the sonics. Wallace Stevens is one of the first American non-continental non-anglo/gaelic poets of American poetry. I still read Emperor of Ice Cream closely, it might be phony, but it makes me think about how I want to sound in a poem. Wallace Steven, Carl Sandburg, WC Williams were different than Eliot and Pound. The former were American poetry after Leaves of Grass.

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

Really read it. It's lucid succinct advice about writing poetry. Maybe I'll just use it as my template when people ask for feedback.

Read it, thank you. Now I'm afraid to write again. j.k.

 

[Angeline]

It's the sonics. Wallace Stevens is one of the first non-continental non-anglo/gaelic poets of American poetry. W C Williams and Ginsberg liked Leaves of Grass a whole lot, but they sound more like Stevens and Carl Sandburg. Of course Stevens was a fan of Eliot and Pound, they were fresh. I still think about this poem all the time, it might be phony, but it makes me think about how I want to sound in a poem.


Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring 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 sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Yes, sonics. If you read that Gioia essay in my previous post, you'll see he agrees with you.

I'm not sure I'd call The Emperor of Ice Cream "phony" (though it's one way to interpret it, everyone's reaction being different). I think it's a poem written from an atheist (maybe agnostic) perspective. These people are at a funeral or wake, right? The "roller of big cigars" is the undertaker and "concupiscent curds"...well, maybe I'm just morbid but death is cold and making remains cold and putting them in a "cup" is what undertakers do. The women are dressed for the wake, the flowers are there. And yet it's all so metaphorical that only those "horny feet" say something directly.

And that stunning line:

Let be be finale of seem.

One of the best poetic lines ever, imho. The Emperor doesn't really fit anywhere in this funeral scene, except that the narrator tells us he's the only real thing. Except he isn't.

And all this epic tragedy and uneasiness is buried in a sea of whimsical metaphor and sonics.


PS 1201 if you're out there, I think I've finally answered the "why" you keep asking me, at least to my own satisfaction.

 

[Angeline]

Read it, thank you. Now I'm afraid to write again. j.k.

Er yes. It does have its discouraging aspects lol.

 

[theognis]

Reminds me of people who find tremendous meaning in a Jackson Pollock drip painting.

 

[Angeline]

Reminds me of people who find tremendous meaning in a Jackson Pollock drip painting.

Ok, but the fact that I value it is all that really matters to me.

 

[theognis]

Ok, but the fact that I value it is all that really matters to me.

And the fact that I don't place great value on it is what matters to me. As I've said before, I left the art world after college because I found it phony. I find much of what Stevens wrote has that same phoniness, but it's all a matter of opinion, isn't it?

 

[Angeline]

And the fact that I don't place great value on it is what matters to me. As I've said before, I left the art world after college because I found it phony. I find much of what Stevens wrote has that same phoniness, but it's all a matter of opinion, isn't it?

I didn't know that about you. And you are absolutely right. I respect that our opinions come from different places and are equally valid to each of us. Life would be so uninteresting if we all had the same opinions and interpretations.

 

[HarryHill]

Read it, thank you. Now I'm afraid to write again. j.k.

..
Oh god tessie, write, write

 

[twelveoone]

At the risk of sounding like Jerry Seinfield: So what's the deal with Wallace Stevens?

I met the poetry of Wallace here thanks to the inimitable Annaswirls. She challenged us to write poetry inspired by Steven's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Some (like Harold Bloom, for example) count him among the major twentieth-century American poets (along with TS Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost). Others find him too difficult and unnecessarily arcane.

1201 has challenged me (more than once!) to explicate Stevens' poetry. I get the impression that he (Mr. 12) has a reaction to him similar to Yeats: he appreciates the poetry but isn't really a fan--feel free to disagree or explain if I have that wrong, 12.

I find his poems at once difficult and appealing. HarryHill noted the appeal of Stevens' sonics and phrasings here.

I'm in no position to analyze his poems, but I'm trying to learn. His poetry is typically abstract and (while I wouldn't call him exactly a philosophical poet) meditative, strongly influenced by his beliefs about perception and reality. He was also, in his later writings apparently, increasingly influenced by modernism and the abstract expressionism of artists like Picasso and Klee.

I'll be posting some of his poems here. If anyone wants to explore them, too, feel to jump in, share, argue, distract as the spirit moves you.


The Snow Man
Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

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

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

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

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

Yeats I understand, his technical competence puts him in a rarefied league, it is rather easy to see what he is doing, it is also easy to see through him. And most of the time I don't like him.
Stevens is something else.

13 ways... strikes me as bullshit, but I'm looking at it from a jaded position. It is old hat. But what was it when it was written?

Stevens I just don't understand. Frost you can never understand, but you get three quarters of the way there...and then you realize there is something more. I get that feeling with Stevens but I just can't get a toehold.