Wallace Stevens

One great writer of note is Wallace Stevens [1879-1955], an American modernist. His great poem "The Idea of Order at Key West" should be more famous than it is--it should be read instead of his "Anecdote of the Jar" poem [if you haven't already read it]. It's good, but people over value it and don't read his better, longer work. They read that little poem and then go off, having paid their dues. Here's some basic info on him.

He's very well known for his poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" here, which is great, but it's almost like he created this great new form, and that was the basic version. I feel later poets were the ones lucky enough to be exposed to what he invented there, and take it to a more beautiful and complex place. I think he lay the groundwork there.

He can almost get to H.D.'s level of Greek neo-classist imagery, and yet he has a touch of Dionysus, of Eliot's type of playing around with things [ie. in his The Wasteland here and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.]


Here's an excerpt of "The Idea of Order at Key West", the whole thing is here:

Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion 
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, 
That was not ours although we understood, 
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean. 

The sea was not a mask. No more was she. 
The song and water were not medleyed sound 
Even if what she sang was what she heard. 
Since what she sang was uttered word by word. 
It may be that in all her phrases stirred 
The grinding water and the gasping wind; 
But it was she and not the sea we heard. 

For she was the maker of the song she sang. 
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea 
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing. 
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew 
It was the spirit that we sought and knew 
That we should ask this often as she sang. 

If it was only the dark voice of the sea 
That rose, or even colored by many waves; 
If it was only the outer voice of sky 
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled, 
However clear, it would have been deep air, [...]