Wallace Stevens Message Board

So, what's your favorite Stevens poem? Mine is probably Le Monocle de Mon Oncle.

Even though it chronicles the decline of one's (shall we say) physiological responses with age, for me it counterbalances that loss with the growth of perception/wisdom that also comes with the years. The narrator's discernment at the end of the poem ("... until now I never knew that fluttering things have so distinct a shade.") is not only about pigeons, but about Life itself (well, that's how I read it and it works for me ... how about you?).

Besides, this poem has such wonderful quips like "If sex were all, then every trembling hand could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words." I laugh every time I read that!

I love so many other of his poems, probably as much as Oncle: Sunday Morning; Blue Guitar; Peter Quince at the Clavier; The Idea of Order in Key West and Mozart, 1935 are a few of the poems that I read over and over.

How about you? Favorites? Questions? I certainly don't have the answers, but I hope we can all talk about these poems without fear of appearing unsophisticated ... there are layers upon layers of meaning that most people will never get, but perhaps we can learn some from others here.

I went to a very informal poetry reading a couple of years ago and an older man who was legally blind asked me to read "Peter Quince" out loud to everyone as his reading (he knew I liked Stevens). When I had finished, someone asked him what it all meant and he had the perfect answer ... "Hell if I know! But didn't you hear the MUSIC in those words?" (and may Bob Rest In Peace, now - he was one of those that they broke the mold when he was born).

At any rate, welcome (and isn't that photo just the BEST?! (it's my prize google-find this week)).

Oh, excellent. I really love Wallace Stevens, but have no formal training in poetry or the study of literature, so my enjoyment is often at the level of hearing the "music in those words."

Favorites would be very difficult. I may need to go through my copy of the Palm at the End of the Mind (one of the most marked-up and dogeared of all my books), but *some* of them include:

* The Idea of Order at Key West
* The Owl in the Sarcophagus
* Sunday Morning
* The Pure Good of Theory

From the last:

It is time that beats in the breast and it is time
That batters against the mind, silent and proud,
The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.

Even breathing is the beating of time, in kind;
A retardation of its battering,
A horse grotesquely taut, a walker like

A shadow in mid-earth. If we propose
A large-sculptured, platonic person, free from time
And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak,

A form, then, protected from the battering, may
Mature: A capable being may replace
Dark horse and walker walking rapidly.

Felicity, ah! Time is the hooded enemy,
The inimical music, the enchantered space
In which the enchanted preludes have their place.

Welcome, welcome ... it's always great to find someone else who loves Wallace Stevens. I really liked your quote there and must go read the whole poem.

Douglas

"In the end, only kindness matters."

I've always had a soft spot for Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds and Sunday Morning. They sound right - even if the deeper meaning is too much of a headache to even try and decipher.

Welcome, Telute.

Sunday Morning has always been at the top of my list (I guess that the "top" spot always depends on the mood I'm in at any particular moment) and I always love reading Sunday Morning out loud.

Douglas

"In the end, only kindness matters."

Well, not much "traffic" here of late, so ...

Take a few minutes out your busy day and sit back and sip the fine old wine of Sunday Morning.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=2464

Douglas

"In the end, only kindness matters."

Mozart, 1935

Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-rac,
Its envious cachinnation.

If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.

That lucid souvenir of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of the future,
The unclouded concerto . . .
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.

Be thou the voice,
Not you. Be thou, be thou
The voice of angry fear,
The voice of this besieging pain.

Be thou that wintry sound
As of the great wind howling,
By which sorrow is released,
Dismissed, absolved
In a starry placating.

We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.
Be seated, thou.

Ohh, I can't read On the Manner of Addressing Clouds enough times. It's one of the very few poems I've ever tried to memorize. Didn't work. Terrible memory. But my favorite long poem would have to be Esthétique du Mal. From part XII:

Which is more desperate in the moments when
the will demands that what he thinks be true?

I don't have a favorite, but I do like to open the collected poems at random and really work through and think about what I find. Here's one I spent a lot of time on:

Anglais Mort á Florence

A little less returned for him each spring.
Music began to fail him. Brahms, although
His dark familiar, often walked apart.

His spirit grew uncertain of delight,
Certain of its uncertainty, in which
That dark companion left him unconsoled

For a self returning mostly memory.
Only last year he said that the naked moon
Was not the moon he used to see, to feel

(In the pale coherences of moon and mood
When he was young), naked and alien,
More leanly shining from a lankier sky.

Its ruddy pallor had grown cadaverous.
He used his reason, exercised his will,
Turning in time to Brahms as alternate

In speech. He was that music and himself.
They were particles of order, a single majesty:
But he remembered the time when he stood alone.

He stood at last by God's help and the police;
But he remembered the time when he stood alone.
He yielded himself to that single majesty;

But he remembered the time when he stood alone,
When to be and delight to be seemed to be one,
Before the colors deepened and grew small.

***********************

I love the iamic pentameter perfection of the first line; I love the idea of Brahms as a "dark familiar".
This poem speaks to me of what it is to grow old.

And how wonderful to see "Mozart, 1935" posted.

When I was 15 years old, and a very long time ago that was, somebody (thank you, Patricia B.) gave me a little Peter Piper volume of Stevens and I was enchanted. I understood nothing but the beauty of the sounds and with reading and rereading and much more reading and rereading I started to get a handle on the weath of the poetry. Only with age did I understand how funny it all is!

My favorite would have to be "Anecdote of the Jar." I first encountered this poem in college. Then, it meant nothing. Now, I see it as a statement of the effect that humans have on the world. The simple act of placing a jar on a hill forever changes the hill, the state of Tennessee and the universe.

It's a very quantum thought: The mere fact of observing something changes that thing and allows it to be "nothing else," even if it isn't in Tennessee.

13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, for it's economy of language,
beauty and simplicity.

Judson Jerome, long time poetry columnist of Writer's Digest,
once ranked Stevens' Sunday Morning as the greatest poem by
an American poet of the last century. I disagree but the poem is
certainly one of his best.

Prufrock 21-

Thanks for sharing that! It's very interesting to me.

I'm curious though, what poem do you think is the greatest poem by an American poet of the last century? A different poem by Stevens or one by someone else?

If the latter, what is your favorite Stevens poem (is it Blackbird (I just scrolled up ... should have done that before I started to babble here)?

For me, which Stevens poem is my favorite is a very tough question, indeed. I think the best I could do is come up with a group, including (besides Sunday Morning):

Le Monocle de Mon Oncle;
Anecdote of the Jar;
Peter Quince at the Clavier;
The Idea of Order at Key West;
Mozart, 1935;
The Man with the Blue Guitar;
The Irish Cliffs of Moher; and
A Quiet Normal Life.

Those are just a few that come to mind. There are others of which my fading memory needs a gentle reminder. And, of course, there are those of which I have yet to grow to appreciate.

While I wouldn't argue too much about Jerome's choice of Sunday Morning, still and all, if forced to choose, I would probably pick (well, at least this morning) Le Monocle de Mon Oncle with its subtle, yet powerful, shading of the aging process (more powerful for me than even (ahem) Prufrock (which I have always had as one of my top three favorite poems)). Perhaps, though, it doesn't touch all generations, so it's nomination is clouded.

There are days, though, that Sunday Morning is perfect; others where Mozart, 1935 cannot be surpassed and (slanderous thought here) other days (well, most days, to be honest) that Wendell Berry's To a Siberian Woodsman leaves me shaking.

On the other hand, Doulton's posting of Anglais Mort á Florence above is right on the mark for a person of my age (though, to me, it's prognosis is the exact opposite of Oncle's ... Old Age's Flip of the Coin, I guess?). The same is true of Kukkurovaca's above posting of the excerpt from The Pure Good of Theory. Methinks it is time to reread my Stevens again from cover to cover. So many poems, so little (oh, forget it! It's sometimes rather depressing, isn't it).

Hmm ... scrolling through all of the above, I see I already said most of this about a year and a half ago. I'll shut up (would you please bring me my bed pan and my drool cloth now, my dear).

Still, I hate having to choose a favorite, right?

Douglas

"In the end, only kindness matters."

I enjoy all of Stevens, so having to choose one favorite poem would, in away, belittle his other
work, all of it first-rate. But if I had to named one
it would be 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (for the reasons mentioned above and because I have a
preference for three line verse).

The best poem by an American of the last century
is T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Read it for the first time in college and have not been the same person since.