>Like a book at evening beautiful but untrue, >Like a book

Neither.

Really made me think

muh dairy queen

its nonsense

>>9333414
It's genius to peddle nonsense as plausible genius.

>>9333782
Fucking idiot, best poet of the period.

>>9335082
Seems kind of hard to be both.

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

>>9335577
I loved this poem in Bloom's death poetry anthology. Then I wanted to try some more and I caught my ears; the three or four other poems I found somewhere online were incomprehensible to me. Now I wonder if I didn't perhaps miss the meaning of this one as well. Oh well. I don't really care. It's so restrained, calm. I feel so much mash was decanted for these few drops.

>>9335632

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

>>9335082
explain to me what's so good about the emperor of ice cream

he shilled insurance for a living and needed to wind down by writing nonsense

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Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book -I call that vicious!

>>9335902
Said the man who habitually vomited in the morning. Truly the most refined way!

>>9335680
This is beautiful. Thanks, anon. It's certainly not one of the incomprehensible ones. I feel at peace having slowly sipped something this sober, un-flashy. Or maybe it drops far below my maximum diving depth, for all I know. It reminds me somehow of Calvino's If On a Winter's Night and of Borges and of myself reading Borges on the balcony last summer. I recall one of the poems that went over my head (or under my feet if I'm to cling to the depth metaphor) mentioned some ice cream. To give you a hint as to my poetry reading prowess, I also tried reading Eliot's Prufrock and Hollow Men and all the while I felt like a dimwit who fingers and fiddles with a velvet ring case and can't even find the lock to take a peek at the gem within.

>>9335910
dopesick desu, nietzsche was a junky

>>9335888
>the emperor of ice cream
What don't you like about it?

>>9335927

I had as lief be embraced by the portier of the hotel
As to get no more from the moonlight
Than your moist hand.

Be the voice of the night and Florida in my ear.
Use dasky words and dusky images.
Darken your speech.

Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,
But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,
Conceiving words,

As the night conceives the sea-sound in silence,
And out of the droning sibilants makes
A serenade.

Say, puerile, that the buzzards crouch on the ridge-pole
and sleep with one eye watching the stars fall
Beyond Key West.

Say that the palms are clear in the total blue.
Are clear and are obscure; that it is night;
That the moon shines.

>>9335927
You mean The Emperor of Ice Cream, I'd guess. AFAIK it describes a neighbourhood wake for an old woman, and how life and joy go on despite death. Or something.

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

>>9335996
tell what the fuck its about

sounds like he was staring at a dairy queen through his window and just wrote nonsense

>>9336132
>>9336132
> Or something.

i know what it describes, you cunt, but who the fuck is the emperor of ice cream? dairy queen?

>>9336219
You seem mad. What on earth does the poem has to do with Dairy Queen?

For what it's worth, I assume 'the emperor of ice cream' refers to the guy making the ice cream in the first three lines. But it could also refer to the desire for life / pleasure being our ultimate ruler- possibly.

>>9336258
This. Ice cream is a femme fatale, some sweet pussy but will kill you dead. Death is the emperor of ice cream

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>>9336258
>What on earth does the poem has to do with Dairy Queen?

what else could the emperor of ice cream signify?

youre saying the cigar roller is making ice cream?

>>9336282
>bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds

>>9336258
I think the emperor of ice cream refers to the gluttony and lust shown in the first stanza which seems vulgar at a wake. But ultimately what remains after death, in the cold light of of reality is life -- coarse, crude life with its concupiscence and ice cream.

>>9336384
Makes sense. Ice cream also melts, which adds to the idea of passing pleasures- life follows death follows life.

What's going on with 'let the lamp affix its beam', though?

>>9336308
horned up cheese :thinking:

>>9336384
deep

im glad anglo poetry isnt my thing

Wallace Stevens was the best poet of the 20th century. Possibly only rivalled to Eliot and Frost.

I suggest you read some of his poems and then watch a lecture or two on him from Yale

It is criminal he is not as widely read as the other two i mentioned

>>9336132
>>9336258

See this is why I fucking hate poetry. It's just a bunch of meaningless random words and if you don't get it then you're just too stupid to unlock the riddle or something.

>>9336454
Nah, you're just not approaching poetry the wrong way. You're doing "analysis" too soon in the process of reading poems.
Also, you gotta stop feeling threatened.

>>9336400
It appears to me to say to place our attention on life not death, and to let the truth (lamp beam) be grounded in being.

To me it is the final acquiescence to the command "let be be finale of seem" where the poet makes the choice for reality over appearance (life over death, physical over metaphysical).

>>9336483
Also the three missing glass knobs could be representing the holy trinity, further supporting the case of physical reality being the only emperor (as opposed to the metaphysical).

>>9336483
Makes sense. Although it just occurred to me that it could be the opposite in a way- to stare death/mortality in the face and see it for what it is. The previous lines seem to go from 'cover her face' to 'it's no problem if her feet show, she's just a dead body'.

>>9336440
2nded, although actually I don't know much poetry and am in no position to judge really.

>>9336495
Looking at it like that it could be a play on the whole "go into the light" trope.

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/stevens/emperor.htm

>>9336208

It's about a child at a funeral.

What Northrop Frye is to Blake appreciation, Helen Vendler is to the appreciation of Wallace Stevens. Anyone even remotely interested in his poetry should check her out.

>>9336282
This is actually a poetic move, marvelous in its way ( it has me thinking of Larry Mc Murtry and his book with Walter Benjamin in the title too ) but unfortunately, an anachronism.

>passing into nothingness, the sense of things becomes fuzzy and irrelevant
>waking into being, the edges of reality refine into meaningful patterns that can be rainbow as such

>>9336764

>can be rainbow as such

What did I mean by this?

>>9336454
Youre wrong. The problem here is that you want poetry too much to resemble prose narrative, when it doesn't-- at all. Consider a nonsensical song you learned as a child, how you liked the way it sounded, and that was it. But then, after knowing it, here and there IT BEGAN to make sense, OR IT BECAME APPLICABLE, in this situation, and in that. It became a possession, a weapon in your expository arsenal custom-built to enable (you) to deal in language more effectively, more exactly, with what the essayists call 'experience'. Often you have to wait on poetry, but the meanings do arrive. 'Build it, and they will come.' Poetry's the branch of literature that concerns itself EXCLUSIVELY with the future, and is by leaps and bounds the best (branch) if you get it.

>>9336454
Holy shit you're stupid.

>I cant understand it
>therefore it is meaningless random words

back to vonnegut redditor

>>9335941
he was a sick man and treated it with shitty 19th century pharmaceuticals, okay?

>>9333414
It measures the passage of time, does it not? In reverse order, from evening back to who knows when? There's irony in these.. similes. How genius can be measured in figures of speech is perhaps the OP's joke?

>>9333414
in what way is it nonsensical? seems very true to me
reading before bed is for pseuds

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>>9336653
Any other good critics on Stevens' work outside of Vendler and Bloom in your opinion?

>>9336454
mostly just modern anglo poetry = my diary riddles desu

imagine if virgil wrote trash like this

>>9339250
Virgil did write trash desu.

>>9338511
I'm not a Stevens scholar so I really can't honestly say. Vendler's relationship to Stevens, however, is like Bloom's to Hart Crane-- Stevens is quite simply HER poet, which makes her writing about him all the more enjoyable, if Stevens interests you. Like Frye on Blake, her desideratum when writing about Stevens is clarity-- she wants the reader to appreciate Stevens as much as she does, pointblank. She doesn't concern herself so much with Stevens' antecedents as Bloom does. A really good small volume by her about S's poetry is Words Chosen.. but good topical essays about him are rife throughout her work.

>>9336258
Fuck you idiot that isn't what it means at all.

>>9337035
Okay.

>>9340504
Okay.

>>9337035
>I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man ...

>>9333414
So tell us, OP. Were you the poster of the Keats quote on the board this past weekend? If so, I have a comment. If not, why bother?

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>>9342617
>the Keats quote
Which one?

The emperor of ice cream is the impermanence of all things. Ice cream melts, it is ephemeral, all we have are out little joys, transient though they are.

>>9343206
the.. hey, wait a minute! youre supposed to know! Maybe I'll post anyway. Keats, after all, was Stevens' man, and just look what S does in a figure to Keats' principal dictum!

>>9336132
That's the ice cream one that I was baffled with. Thanks to this thread and especially to the essays posted here >>9336550 I think I get most, or some of it. If only there was for every cryptic modernist poem (say, Hart Crane for instance) a narrative walkthrough like the one provided by Helen Vendler for The Emperor on that website, dilettantes such as me would stand a chance reading poetry. But then again, where would be the satisfaction in that?

Does anyone feel that "concupiscent curds" sounds more than just earthly or materialistic, it sounds downright obscene? Maybe because in my mind, concupiscent sounds lewd and shameful, and curds sounds too much like turds. You think WS intended that or is this just some fucked up undercurrent in my mind?

As for this >>9336003, I think I got it from the second stanza onwards, but I cannot seem to parse the first verse: "I had as lief be embraced (...)/ as to get...". Huh? It's just like the "Let be be finale of seem" line which took a while for me to get and which I had at first taken for a typo.

>>9344509
Yeah, that poem feels halfway between the easier and the more difficult ones. I read the beginning as something like
>If all I get from you is you holding my hand, I'd be just as happy getting a hug from the hotel doorman
...he wants something more- he wants the other (person?) to speak, to mean something.

Who's he talking to, though? At first I assumed a woman, naturally... but it could be the night itself, the poetic muse, or anything he hopes to commune with on some level.

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Just wondering.

Would Auroras of Autumn be considered a modernist poem or not? The term is so broad and while Stevens himself is considered modernist, some criticism states AoA is working in the Romantic style, even though it doesn't seem that way to me.

>>9344819
Does it matter if someone calls it a modernist poem or a romantic poem? I think those kind of classifications are useless when it comes to individual poems or even poets.

It is a great poem though.

>>9335082
you mean ever?

>>9345611
I'm writing an essay on it and don't want to label it wrong, and I have to state the genre of the text in the title. Don't want to look an idiot. If someone had asked me I'd say it's modernist, but genres are somewhat arbitrary.

It is really great, plenty of new things to discover on every re-reading. I think Stevens as a whole is sorely unappreciated, outside of Bloom and Vendler no one seems to care about him. On the contrary, he published a huge amount of prose and poetry, not surprising there are a handful of masterpieces.

>>9344819
I'd say modernist is the safer choice, if you're looking for someone to cite there's Arthur K. Moore in his 'Case for Poetic Obscurity': 'The Metaphysicals and romantics [...] purged poetic language of overripe elegance and disclosed surprising new idioms; but they did not, for all their alterations, depart significantly from the manuals of style [i.e., rhetoric, Anon.]' (76), compare his statement on modernist imagery later in the piece: 'The modern poet prefers a concourse of images which, in consequence of multiple reference, achieves maximum suggestiveness' (78).
From his collection 'Contestable Theories of Literary Theory' (Baton Rouge: Louisiana St. University Press, 1973).
I'd say it fits.

>>9345849
In that case I guess you do have to decide. What is the essay about? Just the poem in general or a more specific topic?

The poem is definitely in the romantic tradition, to which imagination and nature are important. The auroras in the poem are seen as a great cosmic imagination.

The taming of the mind to the season is common to both Keats and Stevens (notes toward a supreme fiction, credences of summer, auroras of autumn for Stevens; the woman of sunshine and ode to autumn for Keats as examples), but there is regret in Stevens that isn't seen in Keats. Regret and bitterness at the ending "summer".

In Stevens the violence of modernism supervenes the romantic.
So I would agree with the other anon that it is a modernist poem if it had to be labeled one or the other. However, it seems to me to be in the romantic tradition.

>>9346268
I agree, but images/themes typical of the romantic tradition are overtones in a lot of his poems, like the probably heavily anthologised Idea of Order at Key West, take the first two stanzas:

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
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.

I'd the say sea is romantic as well as the idea of the genius loci, at the same time the girl in the poem is definitely human and not a romantic oracle. In truth, the lines

Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.

touch on points addressed by the rational and un-romantic Lessing in his Laocoon where he makes the phenomenological point that human speech is limited in its temporal linearity as opposed to the simultaneity of experience.

I'd say Wallace is too 'real' in the end even in Auroras of Autumn to be placed in the romantic tradition as such.

Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird is my favorite Stevens poem