REEL TIME: Helen Vendler on the Recordings of Wallace Stevens - Woodberry Poetry Room

welcome prior to giving one of his last readings at Harvard in the mid-1950s Wallace Stevens observed I have always disliked the idea of records and yet on the one occasion that I visited the Woodbury poetry room in the new library at Cambridge there were half dozen people sitting around with tubes in their ears taking it all in in the most natural way in the world in Stephens honor tonight we're going to unstop the ears of our singular solitary listening and release those sounds again into the open air or at least into the inner air at the library and who better to accompany that liberation than professor Helen van ler whose career has not been been that of a scholar of one candle spanning as it has the great gamut of Shakespeare Dickinson Herbert Hopkins Yeats Graham and Ashbury to name a few and yet her mind has always returned with renewed and accumulated insight to the works of the Hartford Bard and we are grateful that she has agreed to share her perceptions this evening please welcome Helen Miller people who are standing there are three four empty seats for monthly seats right here come on up and claim the foreign tree seeds somebody thank you all for coming I'm delighted to be here and as always to talk about Stevens once when somebody asked me to give a series of lectures sorry this is okay get down then someone asked me to give a series of lectures and I said I didn't have any lectures I just finished a book I had nothing at the draw I had nothing in files and then he said well what about Wallace students and I said oh I can always say mobile students that's been my doom so to speak I keep coming back and coming back as Steven said to the real and for me he's part of the real this is kind of a history as you know for me and of my own relations with Stevens in brief the poetry room when I was here as a graduate student was closed to women because it was in Vermont which was the men's undergraduate library the women had their own undergraduate library down at Radcliffe so I could not answer the poetry room and was crazy of course but but in the summer time because the summer school was co-ed miraculously Lamont became co-ed too so I went in there with a friend when I was 23 I think and I had my first book I ever bought was Oscar Williams little anthology of modern poetry and so I've been reading in that for some years but every time they came to Stevens I would hit something that I didn't like about him and I didn't even bother to inquire why I didn't like it but I would look down and I would think I don't see how a peignoir could have complacency and I turn the page I don't seem like anyone one look at Blackbird 13 ways it was just completely prejudice on my part because they didn't look like the bones I knew and so the friend I was with wanted to hear Wallace students at that time it wasn't a commercial record of students so heaving a sigh I put on my headphones too and heard this beautiful voice coming out and really the poem called to the one affective music and I immediately thought oh okay now I've got it but I didn't know why I would get that and not get the other things and I was thinking about it later and realized that I was brought up a Roman Catholic with a lot of liturgy and a lot of hymns and all of that and I had also read a great deal in earlier poetry not modernist poetry and so I knew what a poem should sound like and it should either sound like the Ted am or what should sound like my heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense and then that then I'd know it was a poem and Stephens fifth didn't sound like that he didn't declare something up front he didn't declare an emotional situation up front instead he had his complacence ease of the peignoir and of course when I look back now and see to the one affective music it is a hymn it is addressed to the muse who turns out to be a Trinity just like the Christian Trinity she's a sister and a mother and a love so that she occupies the sibling relationship the maternal relationship and the paramour relationship and they around three of her so she fulfills all roles if it was just the way father son Holy Spirit will so everything was innately familiar to me of the outlines of the theology of the muse you might say and I could slide right into it without any any trouble let me play the poem for you to the one affective music also it was very logical yes for the stanzas were linked by clear transitions but she doesn't know what effective music sister and mother and diviner love and of The Sisterhood of the Living Dead most near most clear and have the clearest bloom and have the fragrant mother's the most dear and queen and have diviner love the day and flame and summer and sweet fire no threat of cloudy silver sprinkles in your gown its venom of renown and on your head no crown is simpler than the simple hair now of the music summoned by the birth that separates us from the wind and sea yet leaves us in them until earth becomes by being so much of the things we are gross effigy and simulacrum none gives motion to perfection more serene than the earth out of our imperfections rocked most rare or ever of more kindred air in the laborious weaving that you wear for so retentive of themselves are men that music is intensest which proclaims the near the clear and Vance the clearest bloom and of all vigils musing the obscure that apprehends the most which sees and names as in your name an image that is sure among the iron spices of the Sun o bowel and bush and scented vine in whom we give ourselves our likest issuance yet not to like yet not so like to be too near to clear saving a little to endow our feigning with the strange unlike when Springs the difference that heavenly petit brings for this musician in your girdle fixed their other perfumes on your pale head where abandoned whining set with fatal stones unreal give back to us what once you gave the imagination that we spend and crave you could see that that is a repudiation of one theology in favor of another since I was perfectly aware of how to do that I saw that they turn at the end where after you've done the him like old like stanzas you then came back to the imagination which would need a new form there was the imagination that we spurned which was the one that was what should you say but the one he grew up with and then there's a new imagination which he craves and so the old imagination will be preserved into the new imagination because it will be like but not to like and there has to be an unreal and so that the precession of the poem is towards that adopting of a new theology of the muse if you wish and it's made easy for us in part because there are rhymes which tie it together I was used to rhymes I could understand the poem had rhymes it was a poem I really had very primitive ideas of poetry I had very strong emotions with respect to it but I hadn't thought about it in any theoretical way and by adorning this goddess the muse with a crown and then sort of taking the crown no crown is simpler than the simple hair by leaving her in her natural state but by the end imagining that she needs a new real crown but it will be set with fatal stones not the stones of everlasting life the jewels in your crown in heaven etc but rather the jewels that go with mortality and she is allowed to become a goddess but a goddess of the mortal world rather than a goddess of an eternal world the titles he gives her Oh bow and bush and scented sorry Oh bow and bush and scented wine those are drawn I think from the litany of the Virgin Mary in which a succession of titles a predicated of Mary house of gold tower of ivory metaphorical things like bow and bush and scented line so that he's taking all part of a liturgical significance from Christianity part of the iconic and image such as the Virgin Mary but she's changed with all the goddesses and the figures of the muses of course the Nine Muses who are on Parnassus with Apollo what I liked about it then was that it was not abrupt I was used to lyric having the prime what should I say characteristic of music of sliding from one stands it to the next the way Keats's ODEs slide from one stanza to the next and you're not brought up short by anything and although there are poets before Stevens who bring him up short I didn't like those either I didn't like Browning I couldn't bear upon the start of gara soliloquy in a Spanish boy stirring is you don't know it's a monk who begins by growling and I just didn't know what to do with a poem like that but the ones I could not understand of Stevens were of course skipped over by me until I began to read him in earnest which was the following year and at the time I was writing a dissertation on Yeats and when the dissertation was published one acute reviewer said in the footnotes of this book on Yeats there is a crypto book on Wallace Stevens that was more or less true I he was on my mind in all circumstances and with all respects and I learned a great deal from reading him but it was more that I always do once I had become familiar with his voice I thought of all the poems as mysterious packages that had something for me inside and if I didn't know what it was I had to be patient and try to keep opening the package and finding the mysterious keyhole or something that you would finally make the whole package fan itself out and open itself out for you and then of course it's a wonderful feeling when as he says in another poem we must endure our thoughts all night he's in a snowstorm and he can't see anything we must endure our thoughts all night until the bright obvious stands forth in the cold in the morning when you can see and so it was the bright obvious that kept I'm sticky why didn't I see that before but it's because you have to get used to him as you do we have to get used to all poets but but one of the things that attracted me here too was that he was operating in a world of value that I knew that is to say the world of superlatives most near most clear the clearest blue diviner divinest it keeps coming back to the superlatives which we associate of course with God and the superlative is exclusively occupied by God in terms of Christian theology so he takes all the superlatives it's like a heap of them and applies them over crosswise takes them out of her Christian theology and applies them to the muse to this goddess so I understood the use of superlatives - it's funny how what you bring into poetry in your early stages with it depends a lot on what you can take and then what is opaque to you now this was perfectly transparent to me I had too many things like this all my life so they've encouraged me to go on with Stevens at the same time in early Stevens when I read harmonium from which to the one effective music comes I also read these other weird poems that I couldn't understand I sometimes understood the theme without understanding why anyone would want to write about it this way that's the case with phantoms in pine woods which I'll let you hear it's about roosters etc phantoms in pine woods chieftain if you can add a span in Captain of town with her hackles hawk damned universal as if the Sun was blacker more to bear your blazing tail FAT FAT FAT FAT i am the personal your world is you i am my world you ten foot point among in slings fact the god and ensuring bristles in these pines bristles and points their appalachian tangs and fears not hotly as pan Norris hums I was at a loss I was totally at a loss it sounded sort of like Edward Lear you'll be out on the Pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat but I knew that it wasn't and so I was frustrated that someone should have used you might say the means of dawn sense for the ends of sense and of course now I can hardly believe that I didn't understand it at the time it seemed so transparent now nonetheless what you have is this bizarre scene in Appalachia and the scene is a yard that has little bantam roosters in it and into the yard full of little bantam roosters its batteries in pine woods so this scruffy sort of pine woods around in walks this great big rooster and what the little rooster who speaks to him does is very strange because he acts as first of all as a policeman and then as a kind of cleric first assistant Paul just what a policeman would say and then later he says be gone which is exactly what a an exorcist or something would say so this little feisty creature takes on immense amounts of authority visa vie this great big rooster he has to distinguish between the little bantam roosters roosters around himself and others and this great big rooster who looks in some ways the same has the same kind of coloring and feathers and general shape as the Bantam roosters but he is so immense that the little rooster has to think up some way of identifying him and so that I was very puzzled by those chieftain if you can of a scan in kaftan of ten within Echols alt why this parade of names weird names and it wasn't really I wasn't really sure what he was talking about until I saw in Rio de Janeiro in the museum there one of the feather capes that the South American Indians wore immense or the Chief Justice of where these wonderful cloaks where thousands literally I think of fellows were attached by some tiny stitches to the material underneath so when you put on the cloak of feathers you were a dazzling sight I mean you were a bird clothed more gorgeously because these are tropical birds of course so that the colors are very alive and he thinks you look like an Aztec chief in your feather cape I think that's what is behind chieftain if you can but you can't haha because I am here chieftain if you can can in kaftan that makes him an its Orientalism of course he put the mix him a prince of chieftain of ten naturally with henna hackles halt you can see that this is strong on a strain of sound of the a n sound AI n and chieftain but going on linking all the beginnings with the a and sound and then it goes into an H sound of ten with Hannah petals Paul this is absurd too alliteration is all very well that's all as assonance but when you do it up to the point of preposterous nasai it's there or at least I did when I was young and what took me a while to understand in this poem was how the universal related to the bantam rooster and because Universal has put over against personal and yet the clock is called a ten-foot poet among inch links and so he too was a poet just like the insolent poet who was talking to him but why is he universal and it seems to me it has something to do with epic and Miltonic affluence so that he is grand and he's a universal poet because he's an epic writer and epic tells the story of a whole culture and this little bantam rooster is standing up for lyric and saying i am the personal and defining the personal aesthetically as something that is small by comparison to the epic rooster there but nonetheless charming and lively so that he banishes the rooster by calling it sort of a cross between a giant and ogre and a gross fat person he says spitting it out as you heard on the recording before i'd heard him read it i thought it would be fat fat mass yeah and i was very surprised the first time i heard but it's sort of spitting it out as he says it on the record then came the center of the poem when we see that they talked is that which turns out woods and dominates the whole outside world as if the Sun were back blackamoor to bear your blazing tail and the little bantam rooster turns inward as lyric does and when he says you a world your world is you the epic poet embraces his world and brings it home but I am my world which means that the interior chamber of lyric constitutes an entire world for the lyric poet he doesn't have to go out to the Sun and he has quite enough to do looking into his own soul the end of the poem which is the threat made by the little tiny bold Bantam to the great big poet says I'm not afraid of you calls him portly another word for fat so I used to have a line in men's clothes called portly and the word the little bantam uses for himself the verb he ascribes to himself is bristles and that verb is in the first poem in harmonium where the Firecat bristles in the way when the bus went flattering over over Oklahoma Oh bristle is important for Stevens in this book because it's as though he's a porcupine I can put up quills and suddenly bristle and it's a nice trick I mean little bantam roosters I think doping logic bristle but it's a transferred metaphor an inch length assess of twice bristles in these pines bristles and points their Apalachee to tanks the tank is the top of the pine tree if the tang is the part of the knife that fits into the handle and so the pointed end of the pine trees are not as pointed as they might be until the little bantam rooster bestow some plaintive nasaan them so he's doing and fears not he says smearing portly as can nor his whose who was a word that Stevens uses over and over not always successfully maybe it isn't successful here but it stands for syllables that haven't yet been made into a commendable articulation nature says who all the time the ocean says who and rises and says who and Falls and then he says life's nonsense Pierce's us with strange relation well how could I make words out of this who up and down and so he puts it in when there isn't an articulable thought this big booster is sort of too big to operate in this world the world belongs to the little bristling Bantam but the intrusion of the epic into the lyric world saying so the flexing its muscles and saying look at me and I'm a noble I have a great big feather cloak and you want nobody this is you might say a democratic revolt against monarchy oh this is less clearly associated with tradition of course than to the one effective music it doesn't rhyme it does have more or less four beats but not always five beat lines are there to arrest to the one effective music is all five beat lines and has the law of a regular rhythm coming back that I was used to true in poetry and so this was a puzzle that it was an unlikely incantation of to the one effective music this one was as I said a set of commands and an exorcism get out of my world and the poet was clearly taking the bantam rooster as his own persona I am the personal I am my world with those blank declarative statements in the middle of the poem and if he wanted to say that you wonder why did he need roosters to say it I mean this was the Battlement to me of early Stephens because it wasn't to lark and it wasn't a nightingale it wasn't a Robin and it wasn't a swallow I was used to all those even the blue jay that he uses in 13 ways of looking at a blackbird would have been more congenial to me as at least something that flies of the air whereas bantam rooster scratch around a han yerry and so they have done of the elevation associated with them that the birds of British poetry had or even the birds of American poetry like Whitman's hurt hermit thrush told things that warbles a beautiful song just the way the nightingale does but these these bristling little creatures are not making beautiful songs so they but completely out of my scope of iconic recognition they wouldn't be now but it's it gives you an appreciation for the courage of the modernist poets when they departed so far from the inherited British tradition of lyric that somebody soaked young lyric in that very tradition didn't recognize them as poems I mean it's really bold that dance to put out bantams and pine woods and say this is my idea of what their it should be this is my bird don't expect any Luxan nightingales here only grackles as Stevens later says then many years passed and I spend some of them writing about Stevens his long poems have been criticized as ponderous and elephantine by Randall Terrell whose critical work I loved and so I was very upset that Randall Terrell whose taste I respected and whose energy of critical delight I loved would be saying Stevens was ponderous and elephantine and so he was saying you're a great big rooster and I like little bantams so I decided that somebody should say what was good about the long poems and that's what turned into my second book the book that was hovering in the footnotes therefore the first book and it was a great pleasure to me to write about those long poems because they haven't really been written about much people would dismiss them that's not the interesting Stevens the interesting Stevens was supposed to be the person who wrote 13 ways of looking at Blackburn and Bantam sand pine woods because these shook up the tradition whereas the long poems the first Browning s1 the comedian is the lettuce C's crepes the closest tradition but the other ones were just long meditations that would not be amiss in a book of romantic poetry if you read the Aurora's of autumn you know Northern Lights were written about by Christopher crash and Emily Dickinson and Emerson it was a stock topic the Northern Lights rare as they are in these areas but to write about them again and to write about them in a beautiful lyric title like the Aurora's of autumn was to many critics buys back slide back into the tradition after you were done all these bold and interesting things with blackbirds so I worked my way through the long poems it became very fond of them wasn't able to deal with the last one really although theoretically if it was a chapter devoted to it an ordinary evening in New Haven it was just too big and too much the work of an old man at the time for me a young woman to really understand emotionally that's always a problem but it occurred to me especially in that and I'm sorry now about the chapter I wrote about an ordinary evening in New Haven doesn't do justice to the poem but there it is well when I said to somebody that I could always write more about Stevens that produced a little set of four lectures set of three lectures that came out as a little book called Wallace Stevens where it's chosen out of desire and that turned out to be more popular you might say because people could read the short poems and read something above them were asked to embark on notes total supreme fiction seemed a little much to ask for the layman interest in the bottom poetry but after those long opulent poems credence --is of summer Aurora's of autumn notes to the supreme fiction beautiful poems all of them sequences all of them radially constructed in which you have a center like lights and then you have maybe ten poems coming off the center so it's not a chronological sequence although grievances of summer has elements of that but still it will they basically are concerned with a very rich metaphor like summer while the northern lights and they explore avenues it's as though it's like that where all those avenues to go up off from the active pre-move sorry oh there's those are differently constructed from linear poems and he got a lot said in those cantos those long poems that have so much elbow room I like them because they have elbow room you sort of can move around within them that's the beauty of a sequence that you can do that but then towards the end of his life he began to write some extraordinary short poems that came out we're supposed to put that in a separate volume called the rock but that never got published as a separate volume it got folded into the collected poems of 1955 published on his 75th birthday whereupon he died that's why poets are afraid of doing collected bonuses as example a real tombstone to them and in these lake ponds the means become extraordinarily simple the scenes become simple unlike the scenes in the great often poems of summer poems the voice becomes simple the diction becomes simple the rhythms become simple and I grew to love them before I understood why they were any good because they seemed to have that artlessness that's very hard to think about it's very hard to think about a poem that begins the world sorry the planet on the table that begins Ariel was glad he had written his poems this is a still blank statement and it doesn't so much invite the reader in as declare something to be imposed upon the reader that area was glad he had written his poems so I didn't quite understand any of these moves but gradually I got to understand them better and I'm giving you two of the late poems the first one we'll hear in a minute final soliloquy of the interior paramour is a revision you might say off to the one effective music but what a difference the one effective music was a queen she was on a throne she was a resident addressed vertically the way prayers and hymns were addressed to God she had a little superlatives decorating her and he was in the position of an acolyte or devotee and the tones were all those tones of entreaty incantation praise and suddenly she doesn't she isn't a queen anymore and she's not on a throne anymore she's in fact in his room with him where he writes and I saw his house once which is down the possession of the angle Kim deanery in Hartford and they let us in to see it and the bottom it's a colonial house quite ordinary looking large but on the bottom floor issue face front on the right-hand side there's a Sun Room and then when you go upstairs to the bedrooms Elsie had the main bedroom and the main bath sort of attached to it and Stephen slept in one of the children's rooms and Holly was sleeping in one of the other children's rooms and then on top of the Sun porch on the second floor was the room in which he used to write and listen to music and go up there after dinner and put on a light and begin to perhaps take out things from his pocket that he had written down during the day but composed so that she's no longer on a throne she's no longer full of superlatives she is seen in erotic terms not a sister and mother and diviner love but just as love a paramour it's not a marriage I'm a paramour is not a wife and this paramour is interior the room they are in is really the room of his Souls heart mind whatever you want itself and she speaks he writes a lyric for her to speak she speaks to him and the operative declaration about his own state which she pervaiz to him is we are poor and so that's written out of a condition of deprivation and it's essentially a poem of consolation but then the poet amuse the paramour say to her the fictive paramour really say to her poet when he is without her alone cold he needs something wrapped around him for warmth which he offers him and poor and shows she addresses him and it's a quiet address it's not showy like to the one effective music and it's phrased in the first-person plural there is no I hear there is no you hear there is only a we so that the the fusion of the interior paramour and the poet who was being addressed by his muse is complete they are a we they are never apart they are always fused together I think we could hear it like the first light of evening as in a room in which we rest and for small reason think the world imagined is the ultimate good this is therefore the intensest it is in that thought that we collect ourselves involving differences into one thing within a single thing a single char wrapped tightly around us since we are poor warmth light power miraculous influence here now we forget each other and ourselves we feel the obscurity of an order a whole a knowledge that which arranged a rendezvous with in it's vital boundary in the mind you say God and the imagination are one how high that highest candle like the dark out of this same light out of the central mind we make a dwelling in the evening air in which being there together you can see that there are leftovers from two the one effective music this is when the intensest another superlative rendezvous this set actually is printed out from an erroneous copy text there should be a comma after her but it should be a comma after rendezvous about which arranged the rendezvous within it's vital boundary but in the mind it should be an end before the mind when you try to see how she is consoling him you can see that much of the consolation is you might say maternal somebody who takes you to her wraps a single shawl around the two of you because we are poor and brings with her a warmth and a light and a power seems to be more mother you might say than beloved and yet the closer the poem gets to the end the more she becomes the paramour rather than the mother and the consolation she offers is being there together and the tunis of the poem is the great achievement for someone like stevens who wrote so many solitary poems and could not claim a tunis that he didn't possess he was in an unhappy marriage and so when he invents people in his poems they never have mates there's there isn't any real paramour there's never a real paramour lovely parables of the planter on an island of sky of a sky-blue water and the planter although he has everything else he has a garden he has fruits he has his house he has his Island he has the sky he cannot have a mate because you can't my poems about your life and pretend the things of there that aren't so that this imaginary it's like something out of Spencer you know she's like flora Mela something the interior paramour she's an allegorical figure but she's given you might say royal status by the word paramour we think of that with respect to the Kings mistresses so on it's not a word you use every day and it's a soliloquy that is to say she speaks it alone but it's addressed to someone else so it's a paradoxical soliloquy because it has an addressee and soliloquies soliloquies the classic soliloquies don't have emmalin is alone on the stage when he's doing his classic soliloquies we make the dwelling a dwelling is a very different place from the first line of room they're in a room a room is a piece of architecture but a dwelling is a created virtual home and in this poem he decides that the imagination by which he means anything that is conceived out of fantasy longing expectation effort our beings heart in homes is worth worth is with eternity and only there with hope it is hope that can never die effort and expectation and desire and something evermore about to be and that's really what the imagination is always doing something evermore about to be be with effort and expectation and desire all wrapped into the the ongoingness of the imagination it has taken the imagination to make a dwelling out of that room and since the imagination of function is to create it is the nearest thing in the world of human beings that we know to the great fear of biblical creation by God so when Jesus God in the imagination of one he means that creating a world didn't die out when God disappeared we create worlds every day and they modify the way the words of the poet a modified in the guts of the living Assad and says about Yeats they modify culture what will culture beat without home without Dante without Hamlet always the imagination is creating fictive worlds and always culture is incorporating an effective world and change itself so that another great fiat has been made this all happens in the mind the room in which they sit is the mind within the intensest rendezvous takes place in the mind when he hails this elements of the him here to just us there was into the one affective music when he hails what the material paranoia confer what she confers is a warmth that's maternal a light that's defined via looks a power that is energy of some kind and then finally the miraculous influence this is to go outside the parameters of reality influence was thought to flow in from the stars the whole astrology is built on influence coming down from the stars and it's a miraculous influence it's as though something else is modifying your heart when you are in the realm of the imagination something seems to flood in from somewhere else many poets have testified to that feeling when Stephen starts to the man with the blue guitar but if the thing takes off by itself and you no longer feel you are planning it or creating it in a detailed way but that it has taken on its own momentum the miraculous influence we forget each other in any human dyad couple you can't do that here now we forget each other and ourselves it means that there's a total erasure of selfhood because of the warmth the light the power of the miraculous influence you are literally transformed into another being so that you can forget the anxieties troubles occupations or even the anxieties of the couple itself it's a great line we forget each other and ourselves he has given us a nice version nice metaphorical of the imagination in making that list the warmth a light the power the miraculous influence and then as always the Stevens after he does it through the senses what life he does it through the intellect we feel the obscurity of an order and then he does a list just as the same saw only on a different plane an order a whole a knowledge warmth light power but this time it's on the plane of the cognitive rather than the sensual that's which arranged the rendezvous and that seems was miraculous to way to any poet as it does to any reader that it actually happened Emily Dickinson has a poem when the poet is exhausted by her effort of imagination and she wants to finish up the poem and a word comes up and says I'm ready to fill that space shall I take the the poet said and then the word is asking to be chosen and the poet says wait until I have a finer tried and she tries again and again and she finally realizes that no word is ever going to come to her unless she fixes up her vision and once she has understood the contour of her vision then the Lord will come and fill in the blank but while she's just looking for a word and not for an imaginative completion the word will never come because she hasn't got the contour of the invisible missing part yet in her mind so that order and whole and knowledge and rendezvous is not subject to the human will it seems to be something that happens when you have finished your part in the action the Ronde who happens we say God and the imagination are one and that simply means that we have not lost creation if we have lost God because we are replicating the act of creation in the imagination everyday he didn't think the imagination was confined to poets either and then there is the moment of the superlative how high that highest candle lights the dark but nonetheless help no matter how beautiful that image is of the highest candle is one of his early plays Carlos among the candles just the candles gradually being extinguished the dark is the word that ends the line and blood dark is very large and it's always dark and you light it by this by that by this maybe by love in one case maybe by nature in another case but when you have this rendezvous it is the highest candle and it does send out its race but it is it can do only so much against the dark it's not the Northern Lights he speaks of the central mind and it's what I think for me it's what enables that togetherness the central mind is something you join when you join the mind as it has manifested itself over time which we sometimes call tradition there is a central mind and every as he says every bird goes to that tree when he gave a definition of tradition and a poem by that name he goes through a series of negative definitions was a Phi Beta Kappa poem is it a law no is it memory no so you have all the negative definitions and finally you find out what is tradition and if the Nia's bearing anti-seize on his back out of the fires of Troy and so that the new poet bears the old tradition on his back of the flames of the expiring culture and into the new culture out of Troy and into Rome you could say and that sense is done out of love says Stevens so that the sense the tradition is something you repair to take something from carry it safely out of Victorianism into modernity it's not something that is a law you have to obey or a form of literature that you have to imitate it is something that you can't bear to let go the poem operates on the word light as you know like the first light of evening there may be later ones but this is the first one a light the power of the miraculous influence how high that highest candle lights the dark out of this st. right out of the central mind and then there's the wonderful feeling of wholeness we make it dwelling in the evening air in which being there together is enough enough is for Stevens now the highest superlative in the language enough says it's the old latin scientist that goes into the word satisfaction when he was satisfied and it is even though it's a poem of a certain sort of poverty because we have poor it is also a poem of certain kind of blessedness being there together is enough and that benediction at the end is enough takes a common word and makes it stand for the highest good of above a sense of connection between himself and whoever that inspiring creature is that rushes into his mind and makes a dwelling with him out of his home it is he says enough and the last one that I have here is a really beautiful poem that many of you already know not ideas about the thing that the thing itself the DMZ the thing in itself is what is inaccessible supposedly you can never get through the phenomena to the noumenon but he says I can and so that's a great bold plane is about the failure to thing itself not ideas about the things but the thing itself at the earliest ending of winter in March a scrawny cry from outside seemed like sound in his mind he knew that he had it the birds cried daylight Oh before in the early March wind Sun was rising at 6:00 no longer a battered pinesh above snow it would have been outside it is not from the vast ventriloquism of sleeps faded papier-mache Sun was coming from outside that's crawling cry it was a chorister whose sea receded the choir it is part of the colossal Sun surrounded by its choral rings still far away it was like a new knowledge of reality in this poem the very old man a little wallace stevens mixtape the stevens i think for everyone old the real question is will you see another year and winter has seemed to go on forever and ever and ever and ever and he thinks he won't live this year to see spring and he has just about given up and it's still winter but this is a poem about what he died perceives to be the earliest ending of winter as though winter is going to end several times it's going to have its earliest ending and the first announcement of spring but then there's going to be another snowstorm and then an ending again and finally it will have the last ending of winter when it goes away for good but this is the moment that he loves on the cusp of a season where winter is turning into spring and you can't believe you really are going to see another spring and so what he wakes up and here's this bird cry outside he thinks he imagined it it was a dream and then he tries to prove to himself that really was bird and then he does it by analogy when I looked outside it was dark outside of a week or so ago but now it's like that means the Sun is rising earlier and that's a proof that spring is coming that the Sun is getting up at 6 no longer a bad panache above snow and then he confirms the reality of the cry it would have been outside I didn't make it up it was not a dream it was not from the vast ventriloquist of sleeps faded papier-mache nobody has ever thrown away dreams so cavalierly in literature I mean usually be a prize you know that's not real it has no reality dream and I'm not going to depend on that the Sun was as he says coming from outside and then that proves that the bird is coming from outside - its kind of strange logic that inches along in the poem that's crony cry he's alliterated in cease Gorani cried and then the whole poem opens up it's been scrawny up till then and rather with another diminished diction although frequent repetitions of the same diction but suddenly he sees that the little scrawny cry of the bird is the first sign of spring and he's going to live through spring and he was going to see the Sun alive again raining in the heavens the way it should and he begins to do an opulent diction to make up for the scrawny diction at the beginning when he wasn't sure he was ever going to see spring again at all it was a chorister the cry cry chorister choir colossal choral that's the link of the opulence at the end of the poem it's a pitch pipe he was an altar boy in his youth so he must us a choral saying the altar boys chorus so that he would have heard the pitch pipe that gives the choir but note on which to start and that's the see from the pitch pipe and the see proceeded it's a pun of course the see precedes the choir and the choir then comes in and this little chorister is like it's closest to Hardy's darkling thrush and I wouldn't be surprised if he had the darkling thrush in mind because the darkling darkling thrush is singing a joyous song the heart of himself can't feel at all it's the end of the century it was a chorister who see preceded the choir it was part of the colossal Sun surrounded by his choral rings and then you heard the way his voice fell still far away so he has a vision of summer but he does that that's still to come but at least he has turned the corner and what is he to end by saying but he's so glad is that he didn't think it up it was not for the last ventriloquism of sleeps faded papier-mache it was not just a wish that had taken kind of dreamlike actuality in his mind it was an actual real birds cry and so he's not lying they're having ideas about the thing oh it would be nice if spring would come but he is suddenly visited by the fin itself the first note of spring and he could expand from that note into what is going to come a great colossal Sun and the full choir and yet he knows it's still far away what is it like the first act of any poet is to say what is this like and make a metaphor or a simile because it's only with resemblance that you can etch the outlines of what you're talking about and he falls back on that ancient strategy of saying it was like but it wasn't like anything it was the real as never like anything the real is simply there is you might say an obstruction almost because it will not yield to resemblance it is so exact in itself and so he says it was like a new knowledge of reality knowledge is the word that we saw in the final soliloquy of the interior paramour to us after you go from the sense the hearing you then have to go up into knowledge it has to paul poetry has to begin in the census and continue when in mind and it's just such a simple statement it was like and then a pause it was like a new knowledge secure word of reality secure word nothing like ventriloquism and sleep and papier-mache fake things it's so plain its Quaker you know it's you couldn't get plainer than that it was like I do knowledge of reality so he leaves us with no ideas about the thing that the thing itself and when he is called a poet of the imagination rather than a poet of reality this is the poem to think of because believes that the imagination is grounded in reality and what you want to come to all the time is a new knowledge of reality upon which you can then construct a poem reality he says in his Adagio is only the base but it is the base and so if you won't let it go thank you

Channel: Harvard University

Views: 11,962

Rating: 4.8846154 out of 5

Keywords: poetry, wallace stevens, helen vendler, vocarium

Id: DucRj1wvD04

Length: 59min 37sec (3577 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 20 2012