Stevensiana

[AdamSmith]

An able and diligent lawyer, [Wallace] Stevens was named a vice president at the Hartford in 1934. He was not known there—or in most other places—for warmth and sensitivity. Once, a colleague told Stevens that he’d admired a eulogy Stevens had given at the funeral of another Hartford executive. Stevens replied, “I hope to do the same for you some day.” In 1955, the same colleague, on learning that Stevens had died, asked if it was a heart attack, noting that he would be surprised to learn that Stevens had a heart.

 

http://bcm.bc.edu/issues/summer_2016/features/mystery-man.html#sthash.7zlB5ohK.dpuf

[AdamSmith]

The gentleman haunts my imagination.

 

In summer 2008, in Orlando at the beginning of a week-long reunion with a much-loved retired escort who had just re-entered the biz, we were together at Disney in some walk-thru adventure that featured Triton as its theme, and this would not stop running through my noggin.

 

Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea,

The old age of a watery realist,

Triton, dissolved in shifting diaphanes

Of blue and green? A wordy, watery age

That whispered to the sun's compassion, made

A convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars,

And on the cropping foot-ways of the moon

Lay grovelling. Triton incomplicate with that

Which made him Triton, nothing left of him,

Except in faint, memorial gesturings,

That were like arms and shoulders in the waves,

Here, something in the rise and fall of wind

That seemed hallucinating horn, and here,

A sunken voice, both of remembering

And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain.

Just so an ancient Crispin was dissolved.

The valet in the tempest was annulled.

 

http://www.everypoet.com/archive/poetry/Wallace_Stevens/wallace_stevens_the_comedian_as_the_letter_c.htm

[AdamSmith]

The rest of that stanza goes:

 

Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next,

And then to Carolina. Simple jaunt.

Crispin, merest minuscule in the gales,

Dejected his manner to the turbulence.

The salt hung on his spirit like a frost,

The dead brine melted in him like a dew

Of winter, until nothing of himself

Remained, except some starker, barer self

In a starker, barer world, in which the sun

Was not the sun because it never shone

With bland complaisance on pale parasols,

Beetled, in chapels, on the chaste bouquets.

Against his pipping sounds a trumpet cried

Celestial sneering boisterously. Crispin

Became an introspective voyager.

 

The last sentence applies today very much to me and, I think, to many of us who are here for just that reason.

[AdamSmith]

Slightly different side of him.

 

The Sun This March

 

The exceeding brightness of this early sun

Makes me conceive how dark I have become,

 

And re-illumines things that used to turn

To gold in broadest blue, and be a part

 

Of a turning spirit in an earlier self.

That, too, returns from out the winter’s air,

 

Like an hallucination come to daze

The corner of the eye. Our element,

 

Cold is our element and winter’s air

Brings voices as of lions coming down.

 

Oh! Rabbi, rabbi, fend my soul for me

And true savant of this dark nature be.

[AdamSmith]

Yet another side.

 

In the far South the sun of autumn is passing

Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.

He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,

The worlds that were and will be, death and day.

Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.

His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=20722

[AdamSmith]

One of his first great pieces, written when he was 36.

 

Sunday Morning

 

I

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.

 

II

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 measures destined for her soul.

 

III

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.

 

IV

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.

 

V

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 fulfilment 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.

 

VI

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 the 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.

 

VII

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 feet shall manifest.

 

VIII

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.

[AdamSmith]

Another bit from 'The Comedian as the Letter C.'

 

Nota: his soil is man's intelligence.

That's better. That's worth crossing seas to find.

Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare

His cloudy drift and planned a colony.

Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex,

Rex and principium, exit the whole

Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose

More exquisite than any tumbling verse:

A still new continent in which to dwell.

What was the purpose of his pilgrimage,

Whatever shape it took in Crispin's mind,

If not, when all is said, to drive away

The shadow of his fellows from the skies,

And, from their stale intelligence released,

To make a new intelligence prevail?

Hence the reverberations in the words

Of his first central hymns, the celebrants

Of rankest trivia, tests of the strength

Of his aesthetic, his philosophy,

The more invidious, the more desired.

The florist asking aid from cabbages,

The rich man going bare, the paladin

Afraid, the blind man as astronomer,

The appointed power unwielded from disdain.

His western voyage ended and began.

The torment of fastidious thought grew slack,

Another, still more bellicose, came on.

He, therefore, wrote his prolegomena,

And, being full of the caprice, inscribed

Commingled souvenirs and prophecies.

He made a singular collation. Thus:

The natives of the rain are rainy men.

Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes,

And April hillsides wooded white and pink,

Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white

And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears.

And in their music showering sounds intone.

On what strange froth does the gross Indian dote,

What Eden sapling gum, what honeyed gore,

What pulpy dram distilled of innocence,

That streaking gold should speak in him

Or bask within his images and words?

If these rude instances impeach themselves

By force of rudeness, let the principle

Be plain. For application Crispin strove,

Abhorring Turk as Esquimau, the lute

As the marimba, the magnolia as rose.

 

The bolded bit may be, more than much of anything else in literature, what taught me how to write and think.

 

(In that, I take after another of my idols, the poet John Ashbery, whom a friend of his once described as 'lazy and quick.')

[+ sync]

AdamSmith, I so envy individuals like yourself who are able to extract and interpret the messages within literature and poetry. I have failed just about every English literature or poetry interpretation challenge I've ever encountered and feel I've been, and continue to be, oblivious to so much beauty in the world.

[AdamSmith]

AdamSmith, I so envy individuals like yourself who are able to extract and interpret the messages within literature and poetry. I have failed just about every English literature or poetry interpretation challenge I've ever encountered and feel I've been, and continue to be, oblivious to so much beauty in the world.

Believe me, I am with you in knowing how very much remains in literature that I still don't get.

 

That's one of the beautiful things about Stevens, as with so many artists who are truly great. Unlike, say, Auden and many other 'greats' who fade with time. Reading Stevens intensively since I was 19, I still get new things from him every time I return.

[AdamSmith]

AdamSmith, I so envy individuals like yourself who are able to extract and interpret the messages within literature and poetry. I have failed just about every English literature or poetry interpretation challenge I've ever encountered and feel I've been, and continue to be, oblivious to so much beauty in the world.

Actually occurs a much more useful (I hope) reply: Just read the words.

 

The writers are not trying to conceal, but to expose. (And to discover.)

 

They are way out there on the edge of wondering, Did I just go somewhere where cognizance has not quite before? or instead Did my imagination fail me yet again?

[Kenny]

Actually occurs a much more useful (I hope) reply. Just read the words.

 

The writers are not trying to conceal, but to expose. (And to discover.)

 

They are way out there on the edge of wondering, Did I just go somewhere where cognizance has not quite before? or instead Did my imagination fail me yet again?

"There once was a girl from Nantucket..."

 

[+ quoththeraven]

I have failed just about every English literature or poetry interpretation challenge I've ever encountered and feel I've been, and continue to be, oblivious to so much beauty in the world.

 

Much of poetry, especially modern poetry, is meant to be evocative and allusive, not linear.

 

Blame Eliot, and don't sweat it.

[AdamSmith]

 

"There once was a girl from Nantucket..."

 

A girl from North Carolina...

...vagina...

[AdamSmith]

Eliot's (understand I love him but we must know him):

 

Scribblings of the artist as a young man

King Bolo's swarthy bodyguard

 

Were called the Jersey lilies

 

A wild and hardy set of blacks

 

Undaunted by syphilis.

 

They wore the national uniform

 

Of a garland of verbenas

 

And a pair of great big hairy balls

 

And a big black knotty penis.

 

An extract from Eliot's King Bolo verses and the cover of the new collection in which bawdy material is published

[+ quoththeraven]

Eliot's (understand I love him but we must know him):

 

Scribblings of the artist as a young man

King Bolo's swarthy bodyguard

 

Were called the Jersey lilies

 

A wild and hardy set of blacks

 

Undaunted by syphilis.

 

They wore the national uniform

 

Of a garland of verbenas

 

And a pair of great big hairy balls

 

And a big black knotty penis.

 

An extract from Eliot's King Bolo verses and the cover of the new collection in which bawdy material is published

 

I never said he didn't have reprehensible qualities. But we have already established that I am more favorably disposed to his best-known poems than you are.

 

Btw, the above means that the supposedly complete collection of his poetry I own is far from complete.

[AdamSmith]

I never said he didn't have reprehensible qualities. But we have already established that I am more favorably disposed to his best-known poems than you are.

Your capacity for understatement is enviable.

 

For me, The Waste Land is an aesthetically and emotionally juvenile production whose thrust is to bemoan the protagonist's difficulties with getting it up and getting it in.

 

And the rest of his poems go downhill from there.

 

His essential tonal and attitudinal source was Tennyson, on top of which Tom barnacled a bunch of Modernist decorative elements plucked at random from whatever sources he had, with shallow understanding, been browsing in. For The Waste Land, for instance, Jesse Weston's From Ritual to Romance. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Ritual_to_Romance

 

Together with comparably superficial stylistic borrowings from assorted 19th-century French masters, Baudelaire, Laforgue (and Arthur Symons, a minor British poet but of major borrowing usefulness to Eliot when he was first getting started) and others of what became the Symbolist movement.

 

Yes, I don't much care for ol' Tom of St. Louis.

[AdamSmith]

Here is Dylan Thomas, who had little use for Eliot, reciting -- in his best imitation of Missouri-born Eliot's put-on Brit accent -- Henry Reed's sublime Eliot parody 'Chard Whitlow' (after TSE's 'Burnt Norton').

 

[AdamSmith]

CHARD WHITLOW

(Mr. Eliot's Sunday Evening Postscript)

 

As we get older we do not get any younger.

Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five,

And this time last year I was fifty-four,

And this time next year I shall be sixty-two.

And I cannot say I should like (to speak for myself)

To see my time over again—if you can call it time:

Fidgeting uneasily under a draughty stair,

Or counting sleepless nights in the crowded Tube.

 

There are certain precautions—though none of them very reliable—

Against the blast from bombs and the flying splinter,

But not against the blast from heaven, vento dei venti,

The wind within a wind unable to speak for wind;

And the frigid burnings of purgatory will not be touched

By any emollient.

 

I think you will find this put,

Better than I could ever hope to express it,

In the words of Kharma: "It is, we believe,

Idle to hope that the simple stirrup-pump

Will extinguish hell."

 

Oh, listeners,

And you especially who have turned off the wireless

And sit in Stoke or Basingstoke listening appreciatively to the silence,

(Which is also the silence of hell) pray, not for your skins, but for your souls.

And pray for me also under the draughty stair.

As we get older we do not get any younger.

 

And pray for Kharma under the holy mountain.

 

Henry Reed

[AdamSmith]

Chard Whitlow is a parody, most directly, of Eliot's East Coker (actually maybe my favorite Eliot piece, although even that is not to say much ):

I.

 

In my beginning is my end. In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place

Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.

Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,

Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth

Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces,

Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

Houses live and die: there is a time for building

And a time for living and for generation

And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane

And to shake the wainscot where the field mouse trots

And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

 

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls

Across the open field, leaving the deep lane

Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,

Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,

And the deep lane insists on the direction

Into the village, in the electric heat

Hypnotized. In a warm haze the sultry light

Is absorbed, not reflected, by grey stone.

The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.

Wait for the early owl.

In that open field

If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,

On a summer midnight, you can hear the music

Of the weak pipe and the little drum

And see them dancing around the bonfire

The association of man and woman

In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—

A dignified and commodiois sacrament.

Two and two, necessarye coniunction,

Holding eche other by the hand or the arm

Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire

Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,

Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter

Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,

Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth

Mirth of those long since under earth

Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,

Keeping the rhythm in their dancing

As in their living in the living seasons

The time of the seasons and the constellations

The time of milking and the time of harvest

The time of the coupling of man and woman

And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.

Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Dawn points, and another day

Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind

Wrinkles and slides. I am here

Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

 

Etc.: http://oedipa.tripod.com/eliot-2.html

[Kenny]

CHARD WHITLOW

(Mr. Eliot's Sunday Evening Postscript)

 

As we get older we do not get any younger.

Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five,

And this time last year I was fifty-four,

And this time next year I shall be sixty-two.

And I cannot say I should like (to speak for myself)

To see my time over again—if you can call it time:

Fidgeting uneasily under a draughty stair,

Or counting sleepless nights in the crowded Tube.

 

There are certain precautions—though none of them very reliable—

Against the blast from bombs and the flying splinter,

But not against the blast from heaven, vento dei venti,

The wind within a wind unable to speak for wind;

And the frigid burnings of purgatory will not be touched

By any emollient.

 

I think you will find this put,

Better than I could ever hope to express it,

In the words of Kharma: "It is, we believe,

Idle to hope that the simple stirrup-pump

Will extinguish hell."

 

Oh, listeners,

And you especially who have turned off the wireless

And sit in Stoke or Basingstoke listening appreciatively to the silence,

(Which is also the silence of hell) pray, not for your skins, but for your souls.

And pray for me also under the draughty stair.

As we get older we do not get any younger.

 

And pray for Kharma under the holy mountain.

 

Henry Reed

"There once was a scribbler from St. Louis..."

[AdamSmith]

Example of how Stevens's mind worked:

 

"The Comedian as the Letter C" is a fairly complex work, evincing Stevens's impressive, and occasionally intimidating, vocabulary and his penchant for obscure humor. Stevens later declared that his own motivations in writing the poem derived from his enthusiasm for "words and sounds." He stated: "I suppose that I ought to confess that by the letter C I meant the sound of the letter C; what was in my mind was to play on that sound throughout the poem. While the sound of that letter has more or less variety ... all its shades maybe said to have a comic aspect. Consequently, the letter C is a comedian."

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/wallace-stevens

[AdamSmith]

Stevens held a very low estimate of Eliot's work, even going so far as to write a poem explicitly critiquing the aesthetics of Eliot's verse practices. Stevens refers to Eliot here as "X." (In another poem he refers to Eliot as one of "the lean cats of the arches of the churches.")

 

The Creations of Sound

 

If the poetry of X was music,

So that it came to him of its own,

Without understanding, out of the wall

 

Or in the ceiling, in sounds not chosen,

Or chosen quickly, in a freedom

That was their element, we should not know

 

That X is an obstruction, a man

Too exactly himself, and that there are words

Better without an author, without a poet,

 

Or having a separate author, a different poet,

An accretion from ourselves, intelligent

Beyond intelligence, an artificial man

 

At a distance, a secondary expositor,

A being of sound, whom one does not approach

Through any exaggeration. From him, we collect.

 

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence

Clarified. It is silence made dirtier.

It is more than an imitation for the ear.

 

He lacks this venerable complication.

His poems are not of the second part of life.

They do not make the visible a little hard

 

To see nor, reverberating, eke out the mind

Or peculiar horns, themselves eked out

By the spontaneous particulars of sound.

 

We do not say ourselves like that in poems.

We say ourselves in syllables that rise

From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak.

[AdamSmith]

This Stevens poem illustrates the contrast between what Harold Bloom famously called the strength of Stevens's poetry and the weakness of Eliot's.

 

Poem with Rhythms

 

The hand between the candle and the wall

Grows large on the wall.

 

The mind between this light or that and space,

(This man in a room with an image of the world,

That woman waiting for the man she loves,)

Grows large against space:

 

There the man sees the image clearly at last.

There the woman receives her lover into her heart,

And weeps on his breast, though he never comes.

 

It must be that the hand

Has a will to grow larger on the wall,

To grow larger and heavier and stronger than

The wall; and that the mind

Turns to its own figurations and declares,

"This image, this love, I compose myself

Of these. Of these I come forth outwardly.

In these, I wear a vital cleanliness,

Not as in air, bright-blue-resembling air,

But as in the powerful mirror of my wish and will."

[+ WilliamM]

Until now, I did not see your link to Boston College Magazine. I graduated from the university in 1965, and must have received the magazine.

 

Sadly the English classes did make much of an impression, @AdamSmith. But, I discover Proust, Mann and Kafka after college.

[AdamSmith]

Harold explicates part of "The Auroras of Autumn." Text of the poem here: http://m.poemhunter.com/poem/the-auroras-of-autumn/