Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)
American poet and businessman.
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.
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.
If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.
A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned —
A cymbal crashed,
Amid roaring horns.
Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.
How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,
Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand
Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.
To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as having something to say.
Donna, donna, dark,
Stooping in indigo gown
And cloudy constellations,
Conceal yourself or disclose
Fewest things to the lover —
A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit,
A pungent bloom against your shade.
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
The sun, that brave man,
Comes through boughs that lie in wait,
That brave man.
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.
My candle burned alone in an immense valley.
Beams of the huge night converged upon it,
Until the wind blew.
Then beams of the huge night
Converged upon its image,
Until the wind blew.
What the poet has in mind . . . is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination. The poet tries to exemplify it, in part as I have tried to exemplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives.