Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)
American poet and businessman.
The President ordains the bee to be
Immortal. The President ordains.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
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.
It was enough for her that she remembered.
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.
There is a month, a year, there is a time
In which majesty is a mirror of the self:
I have not but I am and as I am, I am.
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.
In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American — on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one.
I can
Do all that angels can. I enjoy like them,
Like men besides, like men in light secluded,
A poem should be a part of one's sense of life.
But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it,
Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
An unaffected man in a negative light
Could not have borne his labor nor have died
Sighing that he should leave the banjo’s twang.
Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
The sun, that brave man,
Comes through boughs that lie in wait,
That brave man.