Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)
American poet and businessman.
Straight to the utmost crown of night he flew.
The nothingness was a nakedness, a point
On a blue island in a sky-wide water
The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,
Long after the planter’s death.
A substitute for all the gods:
This self, not that gold self aloft,
Alone, one's shadow magnified,
Lord of the body, looking down,
As now and called most high,
The shadow of Chocorua
In an immenser heaven, aloft,
Alone, lord of the land and lord
Of the men that live in the land, high lord.
One's self and the mountains of one's land,
Without shadows, without magnificence,
The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone.
So that's life, then: things are they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.
A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing,
And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?
And that's life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.
Here is the bread of time to come,
Here is its actual stone. The bread
Will be our bread, the stone will be
Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except
The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.
The romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyance
Are parts of apotheosis, appropriate
And of its nature, the idiom thereof.
Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words.
Clothe me entire in the final filament,
So that I tremble with such love so known
And myself am precious for your perfecting.
Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life.
It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confect
The final elegance, not to console
Nor sanctify, but plainly to propound.
If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
Let’s see the very thing and nothing else.
Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight.
Burn everything not part of it to ash.
Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky
Without evasion by a single metaphor.
Look at it in its essential barrenness
And say this, this is the centre that I seek.
Not to be realized because not to
Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because
Not to be realized.
For the poet, the imagination is paramount, and . . . he dwells apart in his imagination, as the philosopher dwells in his reason, and as the priest dwells in his belief ... The imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things."
The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.
One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
I am the angel of reality,
Seen for a moment standing in the door.
Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was
A name for something that never could be named.
There was a project for the sun and is.
I know that timid breathing. Where
Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentously declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.