major american writers: wallace stevens week 9 | march 26 major poem: notes toward a supreme fiction...

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Week 9 | March 26

Major Poem: Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction 329Voices and Visions Film: Hart Crane [Presentation by: Aaron Shapiro]Composer of the Week: Béla BartókPainter of the Week: Paul KleePhilosopher of the Week: Friedrich Nietzsche


Voices and Visions Film: Hart Crane (1899-1932) [Presentation by: Aaron Shapiro]

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Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Hart Crane (1899-1932)


The Antecedents of Hart CraneThe Romantic Movement

The persons in whom [imagination] resides, may often as far as regards many portions of their nature have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, the Power which is seated on the throne of their own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations, for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not, the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World. –Shelley, A Defence of Poetry



The Symbolist Movement in Literature—Arthur Symonds (1919)




Art for Art’s Sake (Aestheticism)


“All art aspires to the condition of music.”—Walter Pater (pictured)





Decadence: “Be drunk. Stay drunk.”--Baudelaire





Decadence: “Be drunk. Stay drunk.”--Baudelaire

Fin de siècle

The French Symbolists

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)3

Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)

Stéphane Mallarme (1842-1898)



Situations have ended sad,

Relationships have all been bad.

Mine've been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud.

But there's no way I can compare

All those scenes to this affair,

Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go.

--Bob Dylan, “You’re Going to Make Me Lonesome When You Go”


With Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud, David Thewlis (Lupin) as Verlaine (Agnieszka Holland, 1995)

Repose of Rivers

The willows carried a slow sound, A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead. I could never remember That seething, steady leveling of the marshes Till age had brought me to the sea.

Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves Where cypresses shared the noon’s Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost. And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them Asunder ...

Repose of Rivers

How much I would have bartered! the black gorge And all the singular nestings in the hills Where beavers learn stitch and tooth. The pond I entered once and quickly fled— I remember now its singing willow rim.

And finally, in that memory all things nurse; After the city that I finally passed With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts The monsoon cut across the delta At gulf gates ... There, beyond the dykes

I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer, And willows could not hold more steady sound.

Moment FugueThe syphilitic selling violets calmly and daisiesBy the subway news-stand knows how hyacinths

This April morning offers hurriedlyIn bunches sorted freshly— and bestowsOn every purchaser3 (of heaven perhaps)

His eyes— like crutches hurtled against glassFall mute and sudden (dealing change for lillies)Beyond the roses that no flesh can pass. [1929]

Chaplinesque

We make our meek adjustments, Contented with such random consolations As the wind deposits In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find A famished kitten on the step, and know Recesses for it from the fury of the street, Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us, Facing the dull squint with what innocence And what surprise!

Chaplinesque

And yet these fine collapses are not lies More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane; Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise. We can evade you, and all else but the heart: What blame 33to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen The moon in lonely alleys make A grail of laughter of an empty ash can, And through all sound of gaiety and quest Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

See Cook, bottom of p. 5.


Composer of the Week: Béla Bartók (1881-1945)


Béla Bartók (1881-1945) Almost inaudibly, a melody begins in violins, a haunting and lonely sound like the sighing of distant wind. The melody floatsm tuning on itself, drifting free as the wind and at the same time certain and purposeful. As it sinks back to its opening note, another group of strings picks up the melody, and now two voices move together in a strange, wandering counterpoint. That is the beginning of Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, an unbridled masterpiece by a repressed and tragic man, Béla Bartok. The innocuous title hardly suggests the expressive breadth of this work for two antiphonal groups of strings. It is a score of strange beauties, wild joy. demonic fury, mystery, awe, and final affirmation. Throughout, one hears an unmistakable voice, passionately humanistic, at once Hungarian and universal. Though some who knew him considered him a saint, Bartok was not religious; his faith lay in nature and humanity. Inevitably, the torturous course of this century did not make his life or his work any easier.


Béla Bartók (1881-1945) He would die in America, like his peers Schoenberg and Stravinsky, but before them, and before the world had quite understood his stature. He had neither their notoriety nor their gift for trailblazing. He is a linking figure between Schoenberg's atonal and Stravinsky's neoclassic schools. While they invented, he listened and learned and composed in his Hungarian-inflected voice. which remains to this day an exotic strain amidst the pervading German, French, and Italian accents of Western classical music. His techniques and most of his ideas about music he kept to himself; he led no factions and left no disciples.\

Yet for all his stretches of dissonance and deliberate barbarity, Bartok is the wamest of the Modernist giants, the widest in expressive range, even in his rages the closest to us in his humanity. In contrast to Stravinsky's rejection of the very idea of expressiveness, Bartok declared, "I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing." And contra the theorizing of Schoenberg and his disciples, he told a professor, "It is no good asking why I wrote a passage as I did . . . I can only reply that I wrote down what I felt. Let the music speak for itself."


Béla Bartók (1881-1945)


Painter of the Week: Paul Klee (1979-1940)

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Paul Klee (1979-1940)


From the root the sap flows to the artist, flows through him, flows to his eye. Thus he stands as the trunk of the tree. Battered and stirred by the strength of the flow, he molds his vision into his work. As, in full view of the world, the crown of the tree unfolds and spreads in time and in space, so with his work; nobody would affirm that the tree grows its crown in the image of its root. Between above and below can be no mirrored reflection. It is obvious that different functions expanding in different elements must produce vital divergences. But it is just the artist who at times is denied those departures from nature which his art demands. He has even been charged with incompetence and deliberate distortion. And yet, standing at his appointed place, the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what comes to him from the depths. He neither serves nor rules; he transmits. His position is humble. And the beauty at the crown is not his own. He is merely a channel.—Paul Klee


Affect the world, but not as part of a multiplicity like bacteria, but as an entity, down here, with connections to what is up there. To be anchored in the cosmos, a stranger here, but strong this, I suppose, will probably be the final goal. But how to reach it? To grow, for the time being, simply to grow.—Paul Klee


In the Egelgasse my emotion reached its climax. In the pond inverted clouds were mirrored. Secret pulsation of the still snow, like breathing in one's sleep. Old trees. The impression of a controlled passion. My portrait. Motions stirs an impulse to act in me, an impulse to experience first. My yearning to wander away, into a springtime. Far out into the land. Away. Ever onward.—Paul Klee


As their talent develops guide your pupils towards Nature into Nature. Make them experience how a bud is born, how a tree grows, how a butterfly unfolds so that they may become just as resourceful, flexible, and determined as great Nature. Seeing is believing is insight into the workshop of God. There, in Nature's womb, lies the secret of creation.Paul Klee


David Lavery, “The Angel of 20th Century Art”


Winning does not tempt that man./This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively/by constantly greater beings. (Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Man Watching,” Selected Poems 107)


Klee: Dream City

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Klee: Embrace

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Klee: Ancient Sound


Klee: Highways and Byways


Klee: Southern (Tunisian) Garden

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Klee: Twittering Machine

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Klee: Red Bridge

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Klee: Rising Sun

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Klee: Windows and Palm Trees

Major American Writers: Wallace

Stevens

Klee: Untitled Still Life


Philosopher of the Week: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)


The distinctive vice of the new world is already beginning to infect old Europe with its ferocity and is spreading a lack of spirituality like a blanket. Even now one is ashamed of resting, and prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always might "miss out on something."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science


Little by little it has become clear to me that every great philosophy has been the confession of its maker, as it were his involuntary and unconscious autobiography.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil


In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing. His very gestures express enchantment. Just as the animals now talk, and the earth yields milk and honey, supernatural sounds emanate from him too; he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted in an ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in his dreams. he is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy


The knower is a means for prolonging the earthly dance and thus belongs to the masters of ceremony of existence; . . . the sublime consistency and interrelatedness of all knowledge perhaps is and will be the highest means to preserve the universality of dreaming and the mutual comprehension of all dreamers and thus also the continuation of the dream.



"O Zarathustra," the animals said, "to those who think as we do, all things themselves are dancing: they come and offer their hands and laugh and flee and come back. Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same house is being built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra


How, if some day or night, a demon were to sneak after you into your loneliness and say to you: "This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh . . . must return to you all in the same succession and sequence even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over and you with it, a mere grain of dust." Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god, and never did I hear anything more godlike!" If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and everything, "do you want this once more and innumerable times more?" would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation. . . .?



Happiness lies in the swiftness of feeling and thinking; all the rest of the world is slow, gradual, and stupid. Whoever could feel the course of a light ray would be very happy, for it is very swift.

Friedrich Nietzsche


So far, all that has given color to existence still lacks a history. Where could you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy of conscience, of pious respect for tradition, or of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law or at least of punishment is so far lacking completely. Has anyone made a study of the different ways of dividing up the day or of the consequences of a regular schedule of work, festivals, and rest. What is known of the moral effects of different foods? Is there any philosophy of nutrition?



In some remote corner of the universe, pouring out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of "world history” yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it.

Friedrich Nietzsche


Let us face ourselves. We are hyperboreans; we know very well how far off we live. "Neither by land nor by sea will you find the way to the Hyperboreans.” Pindar knew this about us. Beyond the north, ice, and death our life, our happiness. We have discovered happiness, we know the way, we have found the exit out of the labyrinth of thousands of years. Who else has found it? Modern man perhaps? "I have got lost; I am everything that has got lost," sighs modern man.

Friedrich Nietzsche


Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a clear idea of what poets of strong ages have called inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one's system, one could hardly reject altogether the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely a medium of overpowering forces. The concept of revelation, in the sense that suddenly, with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down that merely describes the facts. One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightning, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form I never had any choice.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo


One day we reach our goal, and now point with pride to the long travels we undertook to reach it. In fact, we were not even aware of traveling. But we got so far because we fancied at every point that we were at home.



But science, spurred by its powerful illusion, speeds irresistibly towards its limits, where its optimism, concealed in the essence of logic, suffers shipwreck. For the periphery of the circle of science has an infinite number of points; and while there is no telling how this circle could ever be surveyed completely, noble and gifted men nevertheless reach e'er half their time and inevitably, such boundary points on the periphery from which one gazes into what defies illumination. When they see to their horror how logic coils up at these boundaries and bites its own tail suddenly the new form of insight breaks through, tragic insight, which, merely to be endured, needs art as a protection and a remedy.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy


I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my motto henceforth.

Friedrich Nietzsche


Parmenides said, "one cannot think of what is not"; we are at the other extreme, and say what can be thought of must certainly be a fiction.

Nietzsche, The Will to Power


Stevens

Fiction

ENGL 2030: Experience of Literature—Fiction [Lavery]

What is Fiction?

In the vacuum arising after he has left behind his animal life he devotes himself to a series of non-biological occupations which are not imposed by nature but invented by himself. This invented life, invented as a novel or a play is invented, man calls "human life," well being. Human life transcends the reality of nature. It is not given to man as its fall is given to a stone or the stock of its organic acts—eating, flying, nesting—to an animal. He makes it himself, beginning by inventing it. Have we heard right? Is human life in its most human dimension, a work of fiction? Is man a sort of novelist of himself who conceived the fanciful figure of a personage with its unreal occupations and then, for the sake of converting it into reality, does all the things he does and becomes an engineer?Jose Ortega y Gasset, History as a System


What is Fiction?

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.Wallace Stevens, "Adagia"


What is Fiction?

Parmenides said, "one cannot think of what is not"; we are at the other extreme, and say what can be thought of must certainly be a fiction.

Nietzsche, The Will to Power


What is Fiction?


Major Poem: Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (329)

To Henry Church

And for what, except for you, do I feel love?Do I press the extremest book of the wisest manClose to me, hidden in me day and night?In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,Equal in living changingness to the lightIn which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,For a moment in the central of or being,The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.


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It Must be Abstract

IBegin, ephebe, by perceiving the ideaOf this invention, this invented world,The inconceivable idea of the sun.

You must become an ignorant man againAnd see the sun again with an ignorant eyeAnd see it clearly in the idea of it.

Never suppose an inventing mind as sourceOf this idea nor for that mind composeA voluminous master folded in his fire.

How clean the sun when seen in its idea,Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heavenThat has expelled us and our images . . .

The death of one god is the death of all.Let purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest,Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber,

Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus wasA name for something that never could be named.There was a project for the sun and is.

There is a project for the sun. The sunMust bear no name, gold flourisher, but beIn the difficulty of what it is to be.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction




IIIt is the celestial ennui of apartmentsThat sends us back to the first idea, the quickOf this invention; and yet so poisonous

Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal toThe truth itself, the first idea becomesA hermit in a poet’s metaphors,

Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.May there be an ennui of the first idea?What else, prodigious scholar, should there be?

The monastic man is an artist. The philosopherAppoints man’s place in music, say, today.But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.

And not to have is the beginning of desire.To have what is not is its ancient cycle.It is desire at the end of winter, when

It observes the effortless weather turning blueAnd sees the myosotis on its bush.Being virile, it hears the calendar hymn.

It knows that what it has is what is notAnd throws it away like a thing of another timeAs the morning throws off stale moonlight and

shabby sleep.





We say: at night an Arabian in my room,With his damned hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how,Inscribes a primitive astronomy

Across the unscrawled fores the future castsAnd throws his stars around the floor. By dayThe wood-dove used to chant his hoobla-hoo

And still the grossest iridescence of oceanHowls hoo and rises and howls hoo and falls.Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

IIIThe poem refreshes life so that we share,For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfiesBelief in an immaculate beginning

And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,To an immaculate end. We move between these points:From that ever-early candor to its late plural

And the candor of them is the strong exhilarationOf what we feel from what we think, of thoughtBeating in the heart, as if blood newly came,

An elixir, an excitation, a pure power.The poem, through candor, brings back a power againThat gives a candid kind to everything.





IVThe first idea was not our own. AdamIn Eden was the father of DescartesAnd Eve made air the mirror of herself, Of her sons and of her daughters. They found

themselvesIn heaven as in a glass; a second earth;And in the earth itself they found a green– The inhabitants of a very varnished green.But the first idea was not to shape the cloudsIn imitation. The clouds preceded us There was a muddy center before we breathed.There was a myth before the myth began,Venerable and articulate and complete.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a placeThat is not our own and, much more, not ourselvesAnd hard it is in spite of blazoned days. We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.The air is not a mirror but bare board,Coulisse bright-dark, tragic chiaroscuro And comic color of the rose, in whichAbysmal instruments make sounds like pipsOf the sweeping meanings that we add to them.





VThe lion roars at the enraging desert,Reddens the sand with his red-colored noise,Defies red emptiness to evolve his match, Master by foot and jaws and by the mane,Most supple challenger. The elephantBreaches the darkness of Ceylon with blares, The glitter-goes on surfaces of tanks,Shattering velvetest far-away. The bear,The ponderous cinnamon, snarls in his mountain At summer thunder and sleeps through winter snow.But you, ephebe, look from your attic window,Your mansard with a rented piano. You lie

In silence upon your bed. You clutch the cornerOf the pillow in your hand. You writhe and pressA bitter utterance from your writhing, dumb, Yet voluble dumb violence. You lookAcross the roofs as sigil and as wardAnd in your centre mark them and are cowed . . . These are the heroic children whom time breedsAgainst the first idea – to lash the lion,Caparison elephants, teach bears to juggle.





VINot to be realized because not toBe seen, not to be loved nor hated becauseNot to be realized. Weather by Franz Hals, Brushed up by brushy winds in brushy clouds,Wetted by blue, colder for white. Not toBe spoken to, without a roof, without First fruits, without the virginal of birds,The dark-brown ceinture loosened, not relinquished.Gay is, gay was, the gay forsythia And yellow, yellow thins the Northern blue.Without a name and nothing to be desired,If only imagined but imagined well.

My house has changed a little in the sun.The fragrance of the magnolias comes close,False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin. It must be visible, or invisible,Invisible or visible or both:A seeing and unseeing in the eye. The weather and the giant of the weather,Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air:An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought.





VIIIt feels good as it is without the giant,A thinker of the first idea. PerhapsThe truth depends on a walk around the lake, A composing as the body tires, a stopTo see hepatica, a stop to watchA definition growing certain and A wait within that certainty, a restIn the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence, As when the cock crows on the left and allIs well, incalculable balances,At which a kind of Swiss perfection comes

And a familiar music of the machineSets up its Schwärmerei, not balancesThat we achieve, but balances that happen, As a man and woman meet and love forthwith.Perhaps there are moments of awakening,Extreme, fortuitous, personal, in which We more than awaken, sit on the edge of sleep,As on an elevation, and beholdThe academies like structures in a mist.





VIIICan we compose a castle-fortress-home,Even with the help of Viollet-le-Duc,And set the MacCullough there as major man? The first idea is an imagined thing.The pensive giant prone in violet spaceMay be the MacCullough, an expedient, Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,Incipit and a form to speak the wordAnd every latent double in the word, Beau linguist. But the MacCullough is MacCullough.It does not follow that major man is man.If MacCullough himself lay lounging by the sea,

Drowned in its washes, reading in the sound,About the thinker of the first idea,He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase, Or power of the wave, or deepened speech,Or a leaner being, moving in on him,Of greater aptitude or apprehension, As if the waves at last were never broken,As if the language suddenly, with ease,Said things it had laboriously spoken.





IXThe romantic intoning, the declaimed clairvoyanceAre parts of apotheosis, appropriateAnd of its nature, the idiom thereof. They differ from reason’s click-clack, its appliedEnflashings. But apotheosis is notThe origin of the major man. He comes, Compact in invincible foils, from reason,Lighted at midnight by the studious eye,Swaddled in revery, the object of The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind,Hidden from other thoughts, he that reposesOn a breast forever precious for that touch,

For whom the good of April falls tenderly,Falls down, the cock-birds calling at the time.My dame, sing for this person accurate songs. He is and may be but oh! he is, he is,This foundling of the infected past, so bright,So moving in the manner of his hand. Yet look not at his colored eyes. Give himNo names, Dismiss him from your images.The hot of him is purest in the heart.Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction




XThe major abstraction is the idea of manAnd major man is its exponent, ablerIn the abstract than in his singular,

More fecund as principle than particle,Happy fecundity, flor-abundant force,In being more than an exception, part,

Though an heroic part, of the commonal.The major abstraction is the commonal,The inanimate, difficult visage. Who is it?

What rabbi, grown furious with human wish,What chieftain, walking by himself, cryingMost miserable, most victorious,

Does not see these separate figures one by one,And yet see only one, in his old coat,His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town,

Looking for what was, where it used to be?Cloudless the morning. It is he. The manIn that old coat, those sagging pantaloons,

It is of him, ephebe, to make, to confectThe final elegance, not to consoleOr sanctify, but plainly to propound.





It Must Change

IThe old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violetsInhaled the appointed odor, while the dovesRose up like phantoms from chronologies. The Italian girls wore jonquils in their hairAnd these the seraph saw, had seen long since,In the bandeaux of the mothers, would see again. The bees came booming as if they had never gone,As if hyacinths had never gone. We sayThis changes and that changes. Thus the constant Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinthsAre inconstant objects of inconstant causeIn a universe of inconstancy. This means

Night-blue is an inconstant thing. The seraphIs satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts.It means the distaste we feel for this withered scene Is that it has not changed enough. It remains,It is a repetition. The bees come boomingAs if–The pigeons clatter in the air. An erotic perfume, half of the body, halfOf an obvious acid is sure what it intendsAnd the blooming is blunt, not broken in subtleties.





IIThe President ordains the bee to beImmortal. The President ordains. But doesThe body lift its heavy wing, take up Again, an inexhaustible being, riseOver the loftiest antagonistTo drone the green phrases of its juvenal? Why should the bee recapture a lost blague,Find a deep echo in a horn and buzzThe bottomless trophy, new hornsman after old? The President has apples on the tableAnd barefoot servants round him, who adjustThe curtains to a metaphysical t

And the banners of the nation flutter, burstOn the flag-poles in a red-blue dazzle, whackAt the halyards. Why, then, when in golden fury Spring vanishes the scraps of winter, whyShould there be a question of returning orOf death in memory’s dream? Is spring a sleep? This warmth is for lovers at last accomplishingTheir love, this beginning, not resuming, thisBooming and booming of the new-come bee.





IIIThe great statue of the General Du PuyRested immobile, though neighboring catfalquesBore off the residents of its noble place. The right, uplifted foreleg of the horseSuggested that, at the final funeral,The music halted and the horse stood still. On Sundays, lawyers in their promenadesApproached this strongly-heightened effigyTo study the past, and doctors, having bathed Themselves with care, sought out the nerveless frameOf a suspension, a permanence, so rigidThat it made the General a bit absurd,

Changed his true flesh to an inhuman bronze.There never had been, never could be, suchA man. The lawyers disbelieved, the doctors Said that as keen, illustrious ornament,As a setting for geraniums, the General,The very Place Du Puy, in fact, belonged Among our more vestigial states of mind.Nothing had happened because nothing had

changed.Yet the General was rubbish in the end.





IVTwo things of opposite natures seem to dependOn one another, as a man dependsOn a woman, day on night, the imagined On the real. This is the origin of change.Winter and spring, cold copulers, embraceAnd forth the particulars of rapture come. Music falls on the silence like a sense,A passion that we feel, not understand.Morning and afternoon are clasped together And North and South are an intrinsic coupleAnd sun and rain a plural, like two loversThat walk away as one in the greenest body.

In solitude the trumpets of solitudeAre not of another solitude resounding;A little string speaks for a crowd of voices. The partaker partakes of that which changes him.The child that touches takes character from the thing,The body, it touches. The captain and his men Are one and the sailor and the sea are one.Follow after, O my companion, my fellow, my self,Sister and solace, brother and delight.





VOn a blue island in a sky-wide waterThe wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,Long after the planter’s death. A few limes remained, Where his house had fallen, three scraggy trees weightedWith garbled green. These were the planter’s turquoiseAnd his orange blotches. These were his zero green, A green baked greener in the greenest sun.These were his beaches, his sea-myrtles inWhite sand, his patter of the long sea-slushes. There was an island beyond him on which rested,An island to the South, on which rested likeA mountain, a pineapple pungent as Cuban summer.

And là-bas, là-bas, the cool bananas grew,Hung heavily on the great banana tree,Which pierces clouds and bends on half the world. He thought often of the land from which he came,How that whole country was a melon, pinkIf seen rightly and yet a possible red. An unaffected man in a negative lightCould not have borne his labor nor have diedSighing that he should leave the banjo’s

twang.





VIBethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade,And you, and you, bethou me as you blow,When in my coppice you behold me be. Ah, ké! The bloody wren, the felon jay,Ké-ké, the jug-throated robin pouring out,Bethou, bethou, bethou me in my glade. There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain,So many clappers going without bells,That these bethous compose a heavenly gong. One voice repeating, one tireless chorister,The phrases of a single phrase, ké-ké,A single text, granite monotony,

One sole face, like a photograph of fate,Glass-blower’s destiny, bloodless episcopus,Eye without lid, mind without any dream– These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy,Of an earth in which the first leaf is the taleOf leaves, in which the sparrow is a bird Of stone that never changes. Bethou him, youAnd you, bethou him and bethou. It isA sound like any other. It will end.





VIIAfter a lustre of the moon, we sayWe have not the need of any paradise,We have not the need of any seducing hymn. It is true. Tonight the lilacs magnifyThe easy passion, the ever-ready loveOf the lover that lies within us and we breathe

An odor evoking nothing, absolute.We encounter in the dead middle of the nightThe purple odor, the abundant bloom. The lover sighs as for accessible bliss,Which he can take within him on his breath,Possess in his heart, conceal and nothing known.

For easy passion and ever-ready loveAre of our earthly birth and here and nowAnd where we live and everywhere we live, As in the top-cloud of a May night-evening,As in the courage of the ignorant man,Who chants by book, in the heat of the scholar, who writes The book, hot for another accessible bliss:The fluctuations of certainty, the changeOf degrees of perception on a scholar’s dark.





VIIIOn her trip around the world, Nanzia NunzioConfronted Ozymandias. She wentAlone and like a vestal long-prepared. I am the spouse. She took her necklace offAnd laid it in the sand. As I am, I amThe spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt. I am the spouse, divested of bright gold,The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst,Beyond the burning body that I bear. I am the woman stripped more nakedlyThan nakedness, standing before an inflexibleOrder, saying I am the contemplated spouse.

Speak to me that, which spoken, will array meIn its own only precious ornament.Set on me the spirit’s diamond coronal. Clothe me entire in the final filament,So that I tremble with such love so knownAnd myself am precious for your perfecting. Then Ozymandias said the spouse, the brideIs never naked. A fictive coveringWeaves always glistening from the heart and mind.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3dpghfRBHE




IXThe poem goes from the poet’s gibberish toThe gibberish of the vulgate and back again.Does it move to and fro or is it of both

At once? Is it a luminous flitteringOr the concentration of a cloudy day?Is there a poem that never reaches words

And one that chaffers the time away?Is the poem both peculiar and general?There’s a mediation there, in which there seems

To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended orNot apprehended well. Does the poetEvade us, as in a senseless element?

Evade, this hot, dependent orator,The spokesman at our bluntest barriers,Exponent by a form of speech, the speaker

Of a speech only a little of the tongue?It is the gibberish of the vulgate that he seeks.He tries by a peculiar speech to speak

The peculiar potency of the general,To compound the imagination’s Latin withThe lingua franca et jocundissima.





XA bench was his catalepsy, Theatreof Trope. He sat in the park. The water ofThe lake was full of artificial things, Like a page of music, like an upper air,Like a momentary color, in which swansWere seraphs, were saints, were changing essences. The west wind was the music, the motion, the forceTo which the swans curveted, a will to changeA will to make iris frettings on the bank. There was a will to change, a necessitousAnd present way, a presentation, a kindOf volatile world, too constant to be denied,

The eye of a vagabond in metaphorThat catches our own. The casual is notEnough. The freshness of transformation is The freshness of a world. It is our own,It is ourselves, the freshness of ourselves,And that necessity and that presentation Are rubbings of a glass in which we peer.Of these beginnings, gay and green, proposeThe suitable amours. Time will write them down.





Stevens


It Must Give Pleasure ITo sing jubilas at exact, accustomed times,To be crested and wear the mane of a multitudeAnd so, as part, to exult with its great throat, To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne onThe shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heartThat is the common, the bravest fundament, This is a facile exercise. JeromeBegat the tubas and the fire-wind strings,The golden fingers picking dark-blue air: For companies of voices moving there,To find of sound the bleakest ancestor,To find of light a music issuing

Whereon it falls in more than sensual mode.But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,On the image of what we see, to catch from that Irrational moment its unreasoning,As when the sun comes rising, when the seaClears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.We reason about them with a later reason.





IIThe blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her

window,Did not desire that feathery argentinesShould be cold silver, nor that frothy clouds Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them,Nor that the sexual blossoms should reposeWithout their fierce addictions, nor that the heat Of summer, growing fragrant in the night,Should strengthen her aborted dreams and takeIn sleep its natural form. It was enough For her that she remembered: the argentinesOf spring come to their places in the grape leavesTo cool their ruddy pulses; the frothy clouds

Are nothing but frothy clouds; the frothy bloomsWaste without puberty; and afterward,When the harmonious heat of August pines Enters the room, it drowses and is the night.It was enough for her that she remembered.The blue woman looked and from her window

named The corals of the dogwood, cold and clear,Cold, coldly delineating, being real,Clear and, except for the eye, without intrusion.





IIIA lasting visage in a lasting bush,A face of stone in an unending red,Red-emerald, red-slitted blue, a face of slate, An ancient forehead hung with heavy hair,The channel slots of rain, the red-rose-redAnd weathered and the ruby-water-worn, The vines around the throat, the shapeless lips,The frown like serpents basking on the brow,The spent feeling leaving nothing of itself, Red-in-red repetitions never goingAway, a little rusty, a little rouged,A little roughened and ruder, a crown

The eye could not escape, a red renownblowing itself upon the tedious ear.An effulgence faded, dull carnelian Too venerably used. That might have been.It might and might have been. But as it was,A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hell And bade the sheep carouse. Or so they said.Children in love with them brought early flowersAnd scattered them about, no two alike.





IVWe reason of these things with later reasonAnd we make of what we see, what we see clearlyAnd have seen, a place dependent on ourselves. There was a mystic marriage in Catawba,At noon it was on the mid-day of the yearBetween a great captain and the maiden Bawda. This was their ceremonial hymn: AnonWe loved but would no marriage make. AnonThe one refused the other one to take, Foreswore the sipping of the marriage wine.Each must the other take not for his high,His puissant front nor for her subtle sound,

The shoo-shoo-shoo of secret cymbals round.Each must the other take as sign, short signTo stop the whirlwind, balk the elements. The great captain loved the ever-hill CatawbaAnd therefore married Bawda, whom he found

there,And Bawda loved the captain as she loved the sun. They married well because the marriage-placeWas what they loved. It was neither heaven nor

hell.They were love’s characters come face to face.





VWe drank Mersault, ate lobster Bombay with mangoChutney. Then the Canon Aspirin declaimedOf his sister, in what a sensible ecstasy She lived in her house. She had two daughters, oneOf four, and one of seven, whom she dressedThe way a painter of pauvred color paints. But still she painted them, appropriate toTheir poverty, a gray-blue yellowed outWith ribbon, a rigid statement of them, white, With Sunday pearls, her widow’s gayety.She hid them under simple names. She heldThem closer to her by rejecting dreams.

The words they spoke were voices that she heard.She looked at them and saw them as they wereAnd what she felt fought off the barest phrase. The Canon Aspirin, having said these things,Reflected, humming an outline of a fugueOf praise, a conjugation done by choirs. Yet when her children slept, his sister herselfDemanded of sleep, in the excitements of silenceOnly the unmuddled self of sleep, for them.





VIWhen at long midnight the Canon came to sleepAnd normal things had yawned themselves away,The nothingness was a nakedness, a point, Beyond which fact could not progress as fact.Thereon the learning of the man conceivedOnce more night’s pale illuminations, gold Beneath, far underneath, the surface ofHis eye and audible in the mountain ofHis ear, the very material of his mind. So that he was the ascending wings he sawAnd moved on them in orbits’ outer starsDescending to the children’s bed, on which

They lay. Forth then with huge pathetic forceStraight to the utmost crown of night he flew.The nothingness was a nakedness, a point

Beyond which thought could not progress as thought.He had to choose. But it was not a choiceBetween excluding things. It was not a choice Between, but of. He chose to include the thingsThat in each other are included, the whole,The complicate, the massing harmony.





VIIHe imposes orders as he thinks of them,As the fox and snake do. It is a brave affair.Next he builds capitols and in their corridors, Whiter than wax, sonorous, fame as it is,He establishes statues of reasonable men,Who surpassed the most literate owl, the most erudite Of elephants. But to impose is notTo discover. To discover an order as ofA season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find,Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,Out of nothing to have come on major weather,

It is possible, possible, possible. It mustBe possible. It must be that in timeThe real will from its rude compoundings come, Seeming, at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,To be stripped of every fiction except one, The fiction of an absolute–Angel,Be silent in your luminous cloud and hearThe luminous melody of proper sound.





VIIIWhat am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory, Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, andOn his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny, Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,Am I that imagine this angel less satisfied?Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

Is it he or is it I that experience this?Is it I then that keep saying there is an hourFilled with expressible bliss, in which I have

No need, am happy, forget need’s golden hand,Am satisfied without solacing majesty,And if there is an hour there is a day, There is a month, a year, there is a timeIn which majesty is a mirror of the self:I have not but I am and as I am, I am. These external regions, what do we fill them withExcept reflections, the escapades of death,Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof?





IXWhistle aloud, too weedy wren. I canDo all that angels can. I enjoy like them,Like men besides, like men in light secluded, Enjoying angels. Whistle, forced bugler,That bugles for the mate, nearby the nest,Cock bugler, whistle and bugle and stop just short, Red robin, stop in your preludes, practicingMere repetitions. These things at least compriseAn occupation, an exercise, a work, A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:One of the vast repetitions final inThemselves, and therefore good, the going round

And round and round, the merely going round,Until merely going round is a final good,The way wine comes at a table in a wood. And we enjoy like men, the way a leafAbove the table spins its constant spin,So that we look at it with pleasure, look At it spinning its eccentric measure. Perhaps,The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,But he that of repetition is most master.





XFat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night,How is it I find you in difference, see you thereIn a moving contour, a change not quite completed? You are familiar yet an aberration.Civil, madam, I am but underneathA tree, this unprovoked sensation requires That I should name you flatly, waste no words.Check your evasions, hold you to yourself.Even so when I think of you as strong or tired, Bent over work, anxious, content, alone,You remain the more than natural figure. YouBecome the soft-footed phantom, the irrational

Distortion, however fragrant, however dear.That’s it: the more than rational distortion,The fiction that results from feeling. Yes, that. They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.We shall return at twilight from the lecture,Pleased that the irrational is rational, Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street,I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.You will have stopped revolving except in crystal.





CodaSoldier, there is a war between the mindAnd sky, between thought and day and night. It isFor that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his roomTo his Virgilian cadences, up down,Up down. It is a war that never ends. Yet it depends on yours. The two are one.They are a plural, a right and left, a pair,Two parallels that meet if only in The meeting of their shadows, or that meetIn a book in a barrack, a letter from Malay.But your war ends. And after it you return

With six meats and twelve wines or else withoutTo walk another room . . . Monsieur and comrade,The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines, His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick,Inevitably modulating, in the blood.And war for war, each has its gallant kind. How simply the fictive hero becomes the real;How gladly with proper words the soldier dies,If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.




major american writers: wallace stevens week 9 | march 26 major poem: notes toward a supreme fiction...

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