Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)
American poet and businessman.
At the heart of many of Stevens's poems are harsh and unpalatable experiences revealed only gradually through his intense stylization.
Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night,
How is it I find you in difference, see you there
In a moving contour, a change not quite completed?
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing
The boots of the men clump
On the boards of the bridge.
The first white wall of the village
Rises through fruit-trees.
Of what was it I was thinking?
So the meaning escapes.
I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and llKnowledge|knowing]] what I am and know.
Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,
Like watery words awash; like meanings said
By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not,
Myself, only half a figure of a sort,
A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition appareled in
Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulders and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?
Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
The paramount relation between poetry and painting today, between modern man and modern art, is simply this: that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince.
It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade.
She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.
Place honey on the altars and die,
You lovers that are bitter at heart.
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
You remain the more than natural figure. You
Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational
Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.
The death of one god is the death of all.
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
What is beyond the cathedral, outside,
Balances with nuptial song.
So it is to sit and to balance things
To and to and to the point of still,
To say of one mask it is like,
To say of another it is like,
To know that the balance does not quite rest,
That the mask is strange, however like.
These
Are the music of meet resignation; these
The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you
To magnify, if in that drifting waste
You are to be accompanied by more
Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.