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raloveridge's review
5.0
This really is the first time I've "gotten" Stevens, and I can't stop thinking about these poems. After writing a term paper on his use of sound, I just keep coming back to how generous he is, how lonely, how willing he is to assert a connection between the world and the human mind. Oh, Wally.
Also, super great edition: great introduction, I prefer this to my (shoddily made) Collected any day.
Also, super great edition: great introduction, I prefer this to my (shoddily made) Collected any day.
ericjaysonnenscheinwriter2392's review
We most treasure the ambiguity of verse because of all literary genres it points out flamboyantly a property we are aware of even in the most formal and mundane communication: we talk, we listen, but we are never sure of what our interlocutor has said and how much we have understood. Yet, despite this communication gap, we continue to talk and listen--why? For the pleasure of communication, of having words pour on our ears and into our minds and hearts. And also for the time and effort we spend remembering the bits and pieces of what was said and the fun of putting it back together into something coherent and comforting. There is also the element of surprise--when the poet writes a line so sharp and twisted that it penetrates our defenses and makes us smile or read twice. Like hitchhikers in fog and rain, we may wait for some sign that we will be saved from our predicament...and then the line comes out of the obscurity, like two headlights piercing the mist, and we see what the poet wants us to see. Wallace Stevens is a poet of such an occasion.
When Stevens asks Ramon Hernandez, in "The Idea of Order at Key West," why the singing ended and why the lights in the boats marked off the dark water of the harbor as if creating a Cartesian grid, we also suddenly feel an urgent need to know. We want to know what things mean, we also want to believe that the cosmos has a pattern, that there is a blueprint behind the indigo blue.
When he implores Ramon for some key to what he senses, Stevens comes as close as any poet can without crashing on the rocks of prose to explaining the life-long objective of his career in verse: to find God, a universal soul, spirit or intelligence behind the apparently random beauty and horror in the cosmos.
Stevens can lose us with his blackbirds and his uncle's monocle and when he tells me that "life is a bitter aspic" I want to tell him to send it back to the kitchen with a footnote. But for every obscurantist poem of Stevens there is a beautifully clear and evocative one, like "Martial Cadenza," "The Dwarf", "The Course of a Particular" and "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm."
Stevens is always trying to solve a problem. It is often a matter that could be mistaken by others as an idiosyncrasy. Even if he resembles a mumbling math genius professor who scrawls inscrutable symbols on a blackboard in dense equations only to erase parts of them while we observe in bemusement, the result of his endeavor is such an elegant placement of words and sounds and such a sincere effort to solve the riddle that we are willing to escort him on his adventure.
When Stevens asks Ramon Hernandez, in "The Idea of Order at Key West," why the singing ended and why the lights in the boats marked off the dark water of the harbor as if creating a Cartesian grid, we also suddenly feel an urgent need to know. We want to know what things mean, we also want to believe that the cosmos has a pattern, that there is a blueprint behind the indigo blue.
When he implores Ramon for some key to what he senses, Stevens comes as close as any poet can without crashing on the rocks of prose to explaining the life-long objective of his career in verse: to find God, a universal soul, spirit or intelligence behind the apparently random beauty and horror in the cosmos.
Stevens can lose us with his blackbirds and his uncle's monocle and when he tells me that "life is a bitter aspic" I want to tell him to send it back to the kitchen with a footnote. But for every obscurantist poem of Stevens there is a beautifully clear and evocative one, like "Martial Cadenza," "The Dwarf", "The Course of a Particular" and "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm."
Stevens is always trying to solve a problem. It is often a matter that could be mistaken by others as an idiosyncrasy. Even if he resembles a mumbling math genius professor who scrawls inscrutable symbols on a blackboard in dense equations only to erase parts of them while we observe in bemusement, the result of his endeavor is such an elegant placement of words and sounds and such a sincere effort to solve the riddle that we are willing to escort him on his adventure.
aceface's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
3.75
iwb's review
5.0
Sadly, I have only just discovered Stevens but have so enjoyed this introduction to him. I love this stuff-because of the firecat.
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