My Favorite Poet

Wallace Stevens is my favorite poet. To me all the poets who came before seem like his ancestors, and all the poets coming after seem like decendents: I'm sure it's not accurate, but I pretty much see all of poetry coming through the small window that is Wallace Stevens.

What a strange fellow! He worked most of his life for an insurance company, and even turned down a position teaching at Harvard because he didn't want to leave his company. In pictures he looks like my grandfather: grumpy and conservative. But his poems reveal a boundless imagination. He was more inventive and radical than the most radical bohemian. He wrote most of his best work after he turned fifty.

In 1993 I somehow got a copy of The Palm at the End of the Mind. For a long time the poems seemed impenetrable, but the titles alone made me think it had to be a great book.

Anatomy of Monotony
Evening Without Angels
Ghosts as Cocoons
Loneliness in Jersey City
Anything is Beautiful if You Say It Is
A Weak Mind in the Mountains
A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts
Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas
Oak Leaves are Hands
Man Carrying Thing
Someone Puts a Pineapple Together
The Planet on the Table

I didn't, and don't, get all of his poems. I took a class on his work in grad school but dropped it: it was too hard, and it wasn't helping me like the poems any more than I already did. But if I don't get them, why do I even like them?

I think I like the way he moves from images to ideas, and then back to images, and then moves into sounds. Okay, that's an intellectualization of the reason. But it is sort of true: his images are not just images. They're ideas and sounds, too.

THE HOUSE WAS QUIET AND THE WORLD WAS CALM

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.

Reading Stevens I feel frozen up parts of my mind breaking away, shifting, and thawing.

Anyway, I highly recommend reading a little WS to anyone who has a mind of winter these days.