Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Wallace Stevens the Inexhaustible
I introduced John Gray to Wallace Stevens some time ago, since when he appears, typically, to have become a world class Stevens scholar. An email arrives from John - 'Stevens is inexhaustible.' In celebration of this unassailable truth, I suggest you exhaust yourself with this great and lovely thing.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
WS a good example of a difficult poet who appeals instantly, something in the tone perhaps, a lucidity & sense of great simplicity, which makes the difficulties of interpretation enticing rather than, well, difficult (for me, anyway).
ReplyDeletei also like it that like Yeats he just kept getting better & better right up till his death from eating too many Danish pastries.
i nearly bought a pricey 'memories of WS' book in Oxford last month - i believe there isn't a decent biography out, and his letters (edited by his daughter) are prosaic & unrevealing either of life's inner passions or even of everyday character - but then i decided i firstly had spent too much on pipes & English teas, and secondly Stevens' poetry exists in its own realm, apart from the everyday (unlike TS Eliot's or Yeats'), though it never enters the hermetic impenetrability of your pal Ashbery.
Too many Danish pastries?! Is that true, Elberry?
ReplyDeleteWell, um, maybe. i came across a funny tale of him attending some important Insurance company meeting and bringing some danish pastries in a paper bag, then insisting on sharing the with all these tedious non-poet Insurance men. If Kafka had been there he would i'm sure have broken a Danish pastry with Stevens, two great writers and Insurance men taking a stand against the non-writer Insurance drones.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely - I hope they were cinnamon Danish... I've got some vague memory of him saying that he led a pretty ordinary, representative life - moderately unhappy with his domestic circumstances and staying as drunk as was consistent with the practicalities for as much of the time as possible. Sound.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget Wally punched Ernest Hemingway on the jaw on Key West. Probably a row over a cheese Danish.
ReplyDeleteAh yes, forgot about the punch up. i think he broke his hand on Hemingway's jaw, didn't he? But given he was in his 50s and Hemingway was in his 30s it wasn't exactly a fair fight, even putting aside that Stevens was a fat Insurance Vice-President and Hemingway a boxer.
ReplyDeleteThere seems something culturally representative of Hemingway, man of bullshit & action knocking Stevens, sublime poet, into the mud over a stupid drunken argument, there you have the modern world in a nutshell; though i think they made up amicably enough. i imagine Hemingway was aware beating a fat Insurance man and poet down didn't really fit with his lionhunting image...
Its a very long song... How does the tune go?
ReplyDelete'Singin' in the Rain', Mutley.
ReplyDeleteThey weren't Danish pastries. They were doughnuts. The incident occurred in Philadelphia after Stevens got off the train at 30th Street Station. Stevens apparently knew Philadelphia well from visits made when he was growing up in Reading.
ReplyDeleteThis poem has changed my life.
ReplyDelete