Comment on any of the assigned poems by Wallace Stevens. How is his work different than Frost's? How do you interpret his abstract language and philosophical themes? Are there repeated preoccupations in his poems--and if so, what would you characterize as his major poetic concerns? Finally, in what way are his poems particularly "modernist"?
You can look up some additional information about Stevens on his Poets.org site.
And here's his obituary in the New York Times.
Steven's "The Death of a Soldier" employs the same morose tone in which Frost exhibits. From the first stanza a pensieve, somber note is hit upon. The poem, though, does not quite feel empathic in any way towards such a tragic end; in fact, it really doesn't seem anything more than a depressing metaphon on the futile nature of life. Maybe Steven's felt unchanged by his world, or maybe he came to some great epiphany to the coldness of the world and how unsympathic it is to the individual? I do find the repition in lines nine and ten especially interesting. Steven's appears to highlight the aspects of wind in Nature almost like an ocean washing away all it encompasses.
ReplyDelete"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" interested me in particular because it's such an eclectic piece. Each section takes on it's own particular flavor. Sometimes Stevens paints a picture with a few choice words. In other sections he makes use of repetition and in others he gets rather cryptic in his references to the blackbird and sometimes he isn't really talking about the blackbird at all. It's strange too that the poem would be divided into these short thirteen sections.
ReplyDeleteTwo elements of Stevens' poetry which immediately struck me were his absolutely dripping imagery and his comparisons of the everyday and the divine, sometimes to the point of intermingling the two. I particularly enjoyed "Sunday Morning." Each succeeding stanza seems to blossom with the the escalation from the ordinary descriptions (the peignoir, late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, bright green wings, etc.) to Stevens' mounting assertions of human mortality ("Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be the blood of paradise?") In the biography section for Stevens in our text, I read that many critics questioned his excessive display in his poetry but I am inclined to be on the side of Stevens. I very much liked the explanation given in the bio section: "Stevens's purpose in part was to show that display was a valid poetic exercise-that poetry existed to illuminate the world's surfaces as well as its depths."
ReplyDeleteI'm having a hard time reading Wallace Stevens without making comparisons to other poets of the period, because I had another lit class this morning, and we read several "modernist manifestos" that demanded poetry be concrete and spare, but also written for a political and/or moral purpose. With that context in mind, the work of Stevens is immediately notable for its apparent lack of ulterior drive. That's not to say that Stevens gave no thought to the causes of his peers, because he did in his later poetry, as our anthology tells us. But so much of the imagery in poems like "The Snow Man," "Sunday Morning," and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" can easily be compared to the natural imagery of Frost, who believed that poetry was not the place for politics or proselytizing. These poems also reminded me of the earlier American Transcendentalists (another point our anthology makes), because of Stevens' sparse and striking descriptions of an individual exploring the wilderness inside himself as he simultaneously explores the quiet wilderness outside. I especially enjoyed the last few lines of "The Snow Man": "For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is" (1441).
ReplyDelete-Margaret Green
In many of his poems, Stevens, like Frost, takes on the heavy subjects of death and the afterlife. But for him, there doesn't seem to be any glorious heaven awaiting. Stevens comes across as an Existentialist, someone who begs us to savor the world around us already.
ReplyDeleteIn "Sunday Morning," the speaker asks "Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be the blood of paradise? And shall the earth seem all the paradise we know?" The only glory we will see is the reality that we live in. In section IV, he lists off afterlives of various kinds and rejects them all "Neither the golden underground, nor isle melodious, where spirits gat them home." None of them will "endure" in the same way our remembrances of living will continue, that we come to wish to breathe in the beauty around us instead of some mythical promise. Even Jesus is in the grave "where he lay;" if there is no afterlife for him, then one can't exist for us.
"The Death of a Soldier" shows how there is not anything special in death -- it is "absolute and without memorial." No need to build up to it because we can only celebrate the life already lived. I love the part where he write "When the wind stops," because as a reader you pause with it, holding breath before moving on to the same phrase in the new stanza. "The clouds go, nevertheless, in their direction" says Stevens; the world keeps moving after we are gone.
Okay this is it! "The Ideas of Order at Key West" has a narrator singing to the sea and creating life and imagery around her song. It's as if she is god, the power to create is inside her, although clearly she is still sunk in this vivid real world setting that Johnson holds onto in all his poems. "She was the single artificer of the world [...] for she was the maker." Once again Stevens points out how we are totally of this world and not some being with no control.
I noticed in reading the introduction about Wallace Stevens that "his concern was with the private interaction of the observed and the observer." Like Frost's poems, this seems to portray a sense of alienation. In Steven's poem, 'The Death of a Soldier,' he speaks of a soldier who dies without recognition. Stevens mentions "he does not become a three-days personage, imposing his separation, calling for pomp.' By this he means to say, that the soldier did not expect any special tribute, or a ceremonial display of his bravery. He simply tells of the soldier as dying away like the season of autumn. He fades away into the unknown, without ever being mentioned, nor expecting to be mentioned. The same way as when Autumn arrives, and then ghost-like, drifts away. The soldier is presented as an alienated figure; similar to Frost's characters and themes/subjects of poetry.
ReplyDelete-Lauren C.
"The Emperor of Ice-Cream" caught my attention because of the way the title sounds. I also really like ice-cream and thought that a poem about the emperor of ice-cream would be awesome. I was confused when the poem started with a cigar roller instead of an ice cream truck man. I liked the use of the word 'concupiscent' (had to look that one up) to describe the ice-cream. I had never thought of ice-cream as sensual. The description of the boys courting the wenches relaxed me a bit because I think about ice-cream and love when I think of summer.
ReplyDeleteThen came the line "Let be be finale of seem", and I was lost. After re-reading it a lot, I only have a vague idea of what it means. My best guess is that it means allowing it to seem like the end.
I thought the second stanza was very interesting because it puts the death of 'she' against the emperor of ice-cream who I associate with summer and life, even though he's got to be cold. She's also covered with a shroud that is embroidered with lively birds. It's ironic because she covered the sheet with birds but now the sheet covers her bird-like 'horny feet'.
I particularly enjoyed "The Idea of Order at Key West." Stevens does a fantastic job of taking the reader on a short journey. For the majority of the poem, the reader cannot help but be taken to that moment when they heard and saw the woman on the beach. His writing here parallels the spirit of enchantment that he hopes to convey. I can get lost in the lines "As we beheld her striding there alone, knew that there never was a world for here except the one she sang and,singing, made."
ReplyDeleteThen the reader is taken to the moment of self-reflection and questioning, and we are made to think about the harshness of reality. After a moment of complete freedom and release, the "blessed rage for order" is keenly brought back into focus. If only we could live in the world of the song forever.
Keep up the good work! Great comments, everyone!
ReplyDeleteOne of the elements of Stevens’ poetry, that intrigued me, revealed itself in “The Idea of Order at Key West”. He seems to back away from the idea of alienation when he says, “Whose spirit is this? We said, because we knew / It was the spirit that we sought and knew / That we should ask this often as she sang.” Stevens frequently uses “we” throughout the poem and this makes me wonder who he is referring to. Is the “we” specifically referring to Stevens and Ramon, or is the “we” supposed to represent the people on the islands, or humanity as a whole? He differs from the Frost poems that we covered because this poem acts as one side of a conversation that Stevens is having with someone. He still ponders the connections of all elements of life and spirituality, this is still a reflective poem but his language doesn’t suggest that he is pondering alone.
ReplyDeleteWhile Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens do have some similarities (they worked around the same time, they shared some influences, and they shared poetic devices), I consider them quite different in their intentions and in their separate signature usages. Frost desired to develop a "homespun" quality of working-a very American, unassuming style with emphasis on meter to make strong points. However, Stevens (though he was also concerned with meter) much more desired to cultivate a beautiful pattern of poetic expression, with lyrical language and eclectic (and thus attention-getting) metaphors and images. Honestly, I'd consider William Carlos Williams to be much mroe like Frost than Stevens. The verbal economy and American distinction of images come much closer to Frost. I'm not saying that Stevens and Frost are total opposites--that would be ridiculous, because they do have things in common--I just think one can find more contrast than comparison between the two sometimes.
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