Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)
American poet and businessman.
I placed a jar in Tennessee
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose upon it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.
This arrival in the wild country of the soul,
All approaches gone, being completely there,
Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.
It was enough for her that she remembered.
That scrawny cry It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
The President ordains the bee to be
Immortal. The President ordains.
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
A fictive covering
Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.
To be young is all there is in the world. The rest is nonsense and cant. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) but its all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing.... Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.
A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.
Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,
Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,
Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.
The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows.
The casual is not Enough. The freshness of transformation is
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are
Twenty men crossing a bridge
Into a village.
My dame, sing for this person accurate songs.
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...
Man is an eternal sophomore.
What is there in life except one's ideas.
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
Is it ideas that I believe?
This is old song
That will not declare itself...