Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)
American poet and businessman.
Yet voluble of dumb violence. You look
Across the roofs as sigil and as ward
And in your centre mark them and are cowed . . .
All history is modern history.
They married well because the marriage-place
Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell.
They were love’s characters come face to face.
Nothing had happened because nothing had changed.
Yet the General was rubbish in the end.
Post-religious man, as Stevens saw him, still had a deep need for the kind of exaltation of the body and spirit which goes under different names in different religions — Christians call it grace, that is, the feeling or knowledge that the workings of God are revealed to the individual, thus lifting him or her up to a state of ecstatic consciousness. ... For the romantics in general such moments of ecstasis in the midst of nature are experienced by the solitary imagination, and the bonds of society are cast away as unimportant. Stevens once said that the romantic is a falsification, and perhaps the reason for the comment was his feeling that such moments of ecstatic relation in the midst of nature had to be given a social and eventually political meaning, rather than remaining in the arena of the spirit. Stevens poetry then offers a pastoral romantic ecstasis that become the occasions for searching out the relations between the individual, his or her community and the natural world.
He imposes orders as he thinks of them,
As the fox and snake do. It is a brave affair.
God is in me or else is not at all (does not exist).
The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.
Abysmal instruments make sounds like pips
Of the sweeping meanings that we add to them.
Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.
To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.
Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.
First one beam, then another, then
A thousand are radiant in the sky.
Each is both star and orb; and day
Is the riches of their atmosphere.
We reason of these things with later reason
And we make of what we see, what we see clearly
And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves.
One of the limits of reality
Presents itself in Oley when the hay,
Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is
A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.…
Things stop in that direction and since they stop
The direction stops and we accept what is
As good. The utmost must be good and is…
The sea returns upon the men,
The fields entrap the children, brick
Is a weed and all the flies are caught,
Wingless and withered, but living alive.
The discord merely magnified.
Deeper within the belly's dark
Of time, time grows upon the rock.
Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.
The world is a force not a presence.
This was their ceremonial hymn: Anon
We loved but would no marriage make. Anon
The one refused the other one to take,
The words they spoke were voices that she heard.
She looked at them and saw them as they were
And what she felt fought off the barest phrase.