The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Context: Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,
Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,
Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.
The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows.
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Wallace Stevens:
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Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: 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 solider dies,
If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Context: p>Tonight the lilacs magnify
The easy passion, the ever-ready love
Of the lover that lies within us and we breatheAn odor evoking nothing, absolute.
We encounter in the dead middle of the night
The purple odor, the abundant bloom.</p
“A vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.”
"Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Context: p> If there must be a god in the house, must be,
Saying things in the room and on the stair,Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor,
Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghostOr Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out
His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.He must be incapable of speaking, closed,
As those are: as light, for all its motion, is;As color, even the closest to us, is;
As shapes, though they portend us, are.It is the human that is the alien,
The human that has no cousin in the moon.It is the human that demands his speech
From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolnessA vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.</p
“To know that the balance does not quite rest,
That the mask is strange, however like.”
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Context: 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.
Wallace Stevens
book
Harmonium
"Sunday Morning"
Harmonium (1923)
Context: We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or an old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
“One might have thought of sight, but who could think
Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?”
Esthétique du Mal (1944)
Context: One might have thought of sight, but who could think
Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
But the dark italics it could not propound.
And out of what sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves 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.
“I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.”
Wallace Stevens
book
Harmonium
"Domination of Black"
Harmonium (1923)
Context: I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
“To be young is all there is in the world.”
Letter to his future wife Elsie Moll Kachel (21 March 1907); as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. 5
Context: To be young is all there is in the world. The rest is nonsense — and cant. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it’s all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing.... Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Context: p>Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imaginedOn the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.</p
“There are men of the East, he said,
who are the East.”
"Anecdote of Men by the Thousand"
Context: There are men of the East, he said,
who are the East.
There are men of a province
who are that province.
There are men of a valley
who are that valley.
“Bethou him, you
And you, bethou him and bethou. It is
A sound like any other. It will end.”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Context: Eye without lid, mind without any dream —These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy,
Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale
Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a birdOf stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you
And you, bethou him and bethou. It is
A sound like any other. It will end.
Esthétique du Mal (1944)
Context: One might have thought of sight, but who could think
Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
But the dark italics it could not propound.
And out of what sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live.
“What chieftain, walking by himself, crying
Most miserable, most victorious,”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Context: p>What chieftain, walking by himself, crying
Most 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?</p
“To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: p>But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A 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 must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real will from its crude 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 hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.
Peter Quince at the Clavier (1915)
Context: Beauty is momentary in the mind —
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden's choral.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Context: p>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 meditation there, in which there seemsTo be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or
Not apprehended well. Does the poet
Evade us, as in a senseless element?</p