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";s:4:"text";s:22615:"He has a prehensile feel for the roots and branches of literary modernism, exemplary taste in what he chooses to quote, and a real gift for exegesis, unpacking poems in language that is nearly as eloquent as the poet’s, and as clear as faithfulness allows. There’s Carl Van Vechten, calling Stevens “a dainty rogue in porcelain” who was “big, blond, and burly”—he stood six feet two—but possessed of “a tiny reserved spirituality.” Arensberg promptly revised the description to “that rogue elephant in porcelain,” in view of Stevens’s social ineptitude. 4 Language as Gesture: Essays in … ... with outward dandy decimated in a flash. Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man Close to me, hidden in me day and night? General Search Information The search results are determined by the combination of information entered into the search fields. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, he spent his professional life as an inusrance company executive, but kept a sharp divide between his business and literary interests. Stevens, in 1954: the quintessential American poet of the twentieth century. Stevens, he argues, “had perforce to shape his image and likeness from materials that lay ready to hand,” and so biographical information is brought to bear, deftly and sensibly, as Bates treats Stevens successively as youth, lover, “burgher, fop, and clown,” “pure poet,” political poet, and inventor of both “medium man” and “major man” (the heroic ideal, so named by Stevens). Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. (Whenever free of them, he commonly drank to excess.) In verse, Stevens transcended anything mean or petty in himself, but for art’s sake; he wasn’t much given to moral scruple. Like other critics I’ve read, Mariani ignores the details of Stevens’s day job, probably as being too mundane to merit attention, but they speak to me. Something very like such calculated risk operates in his poetry: little crises in consciousness, just perilous enough to seem meaningful. The masterpiece “Sunday Morning,” from 1915, is an argument for spirituality without God, interlaced with a woman’s parlor daydream. One late poem hints at a nagging anguish that poetry relieved for him: “It is a child that sings itself to sleep, / The mind.”. The editor, Harriet Monroe, cut some stanzas and rearranged others, and Stevens agreed to it, though he restored the original in “Harmonium.” A certain reciprocal high-handedness among poets and editors—as if the modern in aesthetics required a team effort—marked the time. Tiring of journalism and seeing no path to a life in literature, he succumbed to pressure from his father and enrolled in the New York Law School. At the salon of Walter Arensberg, a wealthy doyen of the new, Stevens met Marcel Duchamp—one of their conversations, in French, suggested to Stevens “sparrows around a pool of water”—and the New Jersey pediatrician and brilliantly innovative poet William Carlos Williams, his peer and cordial rival, who once called him “a troubled man who sings well, somewhat covertly, somewhat overfussily at times, a little stiffly but well.” Williams’s vernacular free verse and Stevens’s sumptuous blank verse long remained magnetic poles of American poetic form. The painting-like “So and So Reclining on Her Couch” begins, “On her side, reclining on her elbow, / This mechanism, this apparition, / Suppose we call it Projection A.” It ends, “Good-bye, / Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.”. In his third book, “Owl’s Clover,” issued by a leftist publisher, in 1936, Stevens made haplessly clumsy allusions to social and political tensions of the time, though he was “a Hoover Republican,” Mariani writes, and also an admirer of Mussolini for rather longer than is comfortably excused as a common myopia of the time. One must have a certain kind of mind—of winter perhaps—to allow Wallace Stevens' famous little double-helix of a poem to do its work. He admitted to his companions that he dreaded what awaited him at home. He became the editor of the Harvard Advocate, read widely and deeply, and mastered French on the way to commanding a fabulous vocabulary, choreographing such tangos of words regular and rare as “The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,” in “The Connoisseur of Chaos.” On graduation, in 1900, he moved to New York and wrote for newspapers. Something like a flame comes off the page (page 71, to be exact) of “The Whole Harmonium” when Mariani quotes lines from Stevens’s first published mature poetry, a waltz-timed passage that begins, “An odor from a star.” It appeared in 1914, when Stevens was thirty-four. He relied, for stability, on the routine demands of his office job. The endings are painstakingly managed victories for the poet’s equanimity. Then, in 1916, perhaps, in part, to secure a suitable life with Elsie, who disliked New York, Stevens took a position with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he worked for the rest of his life. A journal entry from 1899 is revealing. They agreed to a cover story: Stevens had been injured falling down stairs. When Hemingway showed up, Stevens took a swing at him, and Hemingway knocked him down. (He became obsessed with tracing his family genealogies, poring over thousands of documents, and was “deeply disappointed,” Mariani writes, at being denied membership in the Holland Society of New York when, in the poet’s words, “some bastard from Danzig” popped up to spoil the requisite ancestral purity.) (He had shyly used a pseudonym, Peter Parasol, when submitting earlier poems, two of which were accepted.). (verb) The natural elements and the weather set him to wide-awake dreaming on his biggest theme: the capacity of fiction to encompass, and to master, experiences of reality. Paul Mariani’s excellent new book, “The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens” (Simon & Schuster), is a thrilling story of a mind, which emerges from a dispiriting story of a man. The collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines ("Life Is Motion") to several hundred ("The Comedian as the Letter C"). Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. He boycotted the wedding and was relieved when, a year later, she divorced the man, on grounds of cruelty. To Henry Church. Because I will now turn to Wallace Stevens to show how the mechanisms of greatness are concealed in the great poem yet opened up in the near-great. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. True, Reading, Pennsylvania, was a provincial city, surrounded by fertile Pennsylvania Dutch farm country and by woods and mountains where Stevens was fond of hiking, but it was not without culture. Select a purchase Stevens and Santayana Under the scrutiny of recent criticism, Wallace Stevens has begun to emerge as something more than the remarkable stylist and dandy whose appearance in Harmonium set a high-water mark of elegance in American poetry. (adjective) (Though Stevens denied it, he surely had in mind a French critic of that name, the son of a Mexican diplomat, whose rationalist bias made him a perfect foil for the poem’s endorsement of intuition.) option. Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was a giant in the history of American poetry, at once an exhilarating modernist dandy and a champion of earlier Romantic traditions. Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,And of ourselves and of our origins,In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. This collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines ("Life Is Motion") to several hundred ("The Comedian as the Letter C") (see the footnotes for the table of contents). He also had a hunger for erudition, expressed in precocious poems, essays, and orations. He wrote Frost a not quite penitent but mollifying letter, to which Frost replied gracefully, “If I’m somewhat academic (I’m more agricultural) and you are somewhat executive, so much the better: it is so we are saved from being literary and deployers of words derived from words.” But a few years later Stevens had at Frost again, telling him, “The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about subjects.” Frost answered, “The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac.”. But flares of comedy recurred. His father, a stern man, urged upon him a regimen of “work and study, study and work,” toward a professional career. Criticism provides a forum for current scholarship on literature, media, music, and visual culture. A full-time housekeeper tended to Holly. Another praised him as America’s first true dandy, thereby missing the sincerity of his ambition. Brother, he's our father! And if a primary function of poetry is to expand and enrich the scope of a native language, Stevens has no equal in American English except Walt Whitman. He is certainly the quintessential American poet of the twentieth century, a doubting idealist who invested slight subjects (the weather, often) with oracular gravitas, and grand ones (death, frequently) with capering humor. Here's a mensch but can sing dandy. of Contents. Stevens' uniqueness, we have been discovering, extends beyond his style and into his thought and subject matter. But dip into nearly any of Stevens’s poems, to the last, and be braced by a voice like none other, in its knitted playfulness and in its majesty. He was too august at the firm to be let go, but he was never popular there. For the New York Tribune, in 1900, Stevens covered the funeral of Stephen Crane, whom he admired but whose mourners he found “wretched, rag, tag, and bobtail.” He thrilled to a performance, in French, by Sarah Bernhardt, as Hamlet, for what he later recalled as her “intricate metamorphosis of thoughts”—quite the keynote of his own developing sensibility. In the style of a dandy. Published By: Wayne State University Press, Read Online (Free) relies on page scans, which are not currently available to screen readers. His ingenious arguments for the superiority of poetry over philosophy in his one book of essays, “The Necessary Angel” (1951), would be more persuasive if they seemed to designate any poet other than himself. By Joan Richardson. –Wallace Stevens ***Wallace Stevens is often going meta and abstract, confusing nearly all readers, while indulging heavily in a lush Romantic style which later transitions to more blank verse modernism. Harmonium is a book of poetry by American poet Wallace Stevens.His first book at the age of forty-four, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. JSTOR®, the JSTOR logo, JPASS®, Artstor®, Reveal Digital™ and ITHAKA® are registered trademarks of ITHAKA. Possible influences include the French trajectory of dandyism that Jessica R. Feldman argues crossed the Atlantic because American writers such as Willa Cather, Vladimir Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens—all of whom, she ar- gues, used French models—translated French intellectual dandyism advocated by writers ranging from Gautier to Baudelaire (22). Stevens grew up in Reading, Pa., graduated from Harvard in 1900 and initially hoped to earn a living as a New York journalist. It took him seven years to complete and perfect “Harmonium,” leaving out as many poems as he included. Post review. His chief rival, Robert Frost,… Highly variable in its readability. Those “sounds”—sea depths answered by human ones—resonate like organ chords in a cathedral of the imagination. The results made him a regular and imposing presence in literary journals, starting in the nineteen-thirties, and his poems from “Harmonium,” especially, which were frequently anthologized, fascinated a growing popular audience. As a bonus I will use the examples of Shakespeare & Stevens to show why the Modern sensibility greatly enriched poetry, raising the bar in terms of complexity, yet how the same critical approach can discern such patterns still. Rate this poem: Report SPAM. I found some of the text too convoluted to read. Reviews. By Greg Gerke. $21.95. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. “With their silk-swathed ankles softly kissing,” a typical line reads. Thereafter, the book switches back and forth between Stevens’s seraphic art and his plodding life. It begins with “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair”; ranges “Over the seas, to silent Palestine”; decides that “Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams / And our desires”; and concludes with a breathtaking image of “casual flocks of pigeons” that, at evening, “make / Ambiguous undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings.” It was the first poem to appear under Stevens’s name in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, which had recently started publication in Chicago. Stevens wallace stevens dandy more than occasions for feckless behavior My wild gratitude to you for solidarity... When they moved to a new house, in 1954: the quintessential American poet Wallace Stevens the! And Yeats were compelling in 1904 and worked at various law and insurance firms, Pennsylvania to resemble a.. 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