Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)
American poet and businessman.
What is there in life except one's ideas.
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Is it ideas that I believe?
Man is an eternal sophomore.
Be content —
Expansions, diffusions — content to be
The unspotted imbecile revery,
The heraldic center of the world
Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins,
The amorist Adjective aflame...
My dame, sing for this person accurate songs.
Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are
Twenty men crossing a bridge
Into a village.
Blessings, Stevens;
I stand with my back to grammar
At an altar you never aspired
to, celebrating the sacrament
of the imagination whose high-priest
notwithstanding you are.
It must be visible or invisible,
Invisible or visible or both:
A seeing and unseeing in the eye.
The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The operation of the imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art... in life what is important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters what is important is truth as we see it.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.
We shall return at twilight from the lecture
Pleased that the irrational is rational,
Is it he or is it I that experience this?
I am the spouse. She took her necklace off
And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am
The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt.
Behold
The approach of him whom none believes,
Whom all believe that all believe,
A pagan in a varnished car.
Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the self-same sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music.
We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.
Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death's ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.
Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
Exile desire
For what is not. This is the barrenness
Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.
What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,
Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,
Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory,