A few Rounds with Wallace Stevens

And in this corner, the heavyweight champion of the world (in poetry, in the 20th century, in English)... okay some qualifiers, but honestly Wallace Stevens (in Hemmingwayesque parlance) is not a poet you'd want to go a few poetic rounds with... actually, interestingly I heard a story of Hemmingway and Stevens actually getting into a fist fight in Key West (supposedly Stevens broke his hand on Papa's jaw).



Some notes from The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens:

(P. 1-- para 1) "... they see Stevens as a major poet because he addresses major themes: the relationship between the world and the mind, the beauty of planet earth as an end in itself, poetry (or art in general) as an affirmation of life, the problem of belief in a secular age, the need for creating a sense of nobility in a crass and violent world."

(P. 3-- para 2) "If there is a common thread throughout his work, it is that reality and our responses to it are in constant flux. We must learn to live with multiple perspectives... be at home with multiple truths... and accept uncertainty, contradiction, even chaos, as central to existence..."

(P. 4-- para 2) "More than other poets, Stevens pointedly declares that everything we believe is a fiction, that reality is an invention of the mind..."

(P. 6-- para 1) "... he creates new linguistic structures that attain integrity... valorizes perception over conception, moments of genuineness and authenticity that, in a world of constant change, lie beyond, or, one might say, above, reason."

(P. 11-- para 2) "He had come, like his father, to leave behind orthodox belief and observance. But, like William James, he realized the value of preserving some variety of religious experience in expressing what he came to consider the "divine"".

(P. 24-- para 4-5) "... "the poetry of the subject" the specific and precise details of which a poem consists, and the "true subject", which is what the poem expresses... Stevens' "true subject" is the relation of reality and the imagination..."

(P. 27-- para 1) "... the explicit purpose of many (all?) of his poems is to re-create and embody the presence of another person, "an interior paramour."

(P. 29-- para 2) (Regarding Sunday Morning) "Present pleasure set against ancient sacrifice is one of the several antitheses upon which the poem is built: life versus death, change versus stasis, the actual world versus an imaginary one." (and para 3) "She wants a religion of the earth, not of the supernatural..."

(P. 31-- para 1) "Considering different perspectives is fundamental to Stevens' way of thinking about the world."

(P. 32-- para 1) "Sunday Morning is a poem set in the present about the relations of the poet with himself and concerned with discarding the past in order to enter more fully into the present. Eliot, Pound, an Crane need both a mythic and a historical past. Stevens wants the present."

(P. 34-- para 2) (Regarding Tea at the Palaz of Hoon) "Stevens believes that there is a real world, but that we perceive it imperfectly" (Para 3)... If the relation between the individual and the world is uncertain, then any definition of the self is problematic."

Chapter 3 (pgs. 37-47)... about Stevens' long hiatus after Harmonium was published and his perceived conservative politics during 1930s (Man With Blue Guitar) figures prominently into this essay...

(P. 49-- para 2) "A high toned old Christian woman dramatizes the central insight in George Santayana's Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900)... poetry and religion are both human fabrications, designed to express and at least partly satisfy our longing for the ideal... poetry must step forward to provide us with a new mythology..."

Chapter 4 (pgs 48-61) explores the "supreme fiction"-- Stevens' ideas about poetry in some ways taking the place of God/ coming from the same source/ and fulfilling a vital human need...

Chapter 8 (pgs. 103-117) discusses Stevens' less obvious relationship to philosophy-- he was not an historical name dropper as were other great modern poets-- Pound, Eliot...

(P. 109-- para 3) "Much of Stevens' work is epistemological in inspiration... how can we know the external world around us..."

Chapter 9 (pgs. 118-132) Reflects on Stevens' and the importance of the seasons... makes the case for Stevens as a great pastoral modernist poet...

(P. 120-- para 2) "The poems of autumn are always of departure, dislocation, and a enveloping destitution."

(P. 122-- para 2) "The poems of winter are like those of autumn, except pushed further, and in some cases, to an extreme. "... what would it be like to be one with the earth in an absolute sense, to erase altogether the Cartesian rupture?"

(P/ 124-- para 3) "Spring-- the ensuing season offers a different delight. It signals the beginning of subjectivity reemerging... it is possible to discover a meaning in nothingness..."

(P. 127-- para 3) "Summer- the imagination's happiest and most requiting pairings with the world... find celebration in the fullness of summer..."

(P. 132-- para 1) "His 'grand poem', in which he found both frustration and placation, was also his personal refuge and self-appointed cure."

(P. 193-- para 1) "The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God."

(P. 193-- para 2) "I am not an atheist although I do not believe today in the same god in whom I believed as a boy."