Wallace+Stevens

Wallace Stevens

· Born: October 2nd,1879…Died: August 2nd,1955 · Born in Reading, Pennsylvania · Went to Harvard Law School and New york Law School · Spent most of his life as a lawyer for Hartford insurance company · Was called, "the best and most representative American poet of our time." By Harold Bloom · when he became old enough, he enrolled in parochial schools · went to the Dutch Reformed Church · was a reporter for his high school newspaper · received every writing award at Harvard · He had to leave Harvard because his family ran out of money. He then transferred to New york University · Wallace enjoyed writing about the relationship between the mind and physical properties. · Wallace meet a woman name Elsie Moll in 1904, and eventually married her. · They then had a daughter named holly in 1924. · He enjoyed writing about the relationship between the mental and physical properties.

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· · Wallace meet a woman name Elsie Moll in 1904, and eventually married her. · They then had a daughter named holly in 1924. · He enjoyed writing about the relationship between the mental and physical properties. · Wallace enjoyed writing about the relationship between the mind and physical properties. · Wallace meet a woman name Elsie Moll in 1904, and eventually married her. · They then had a daughter named holly in 1924. · He then was taking trips to Key West Florida.

· He wrote to Elsie calling it “paradise”

· He then moved there.

· He was baptized as a catholic in April 1955.

The Man With the Blue Guitar I The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. They said, "You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar." And they said then, "But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are." II I cannot bring a world quite round, Although I patch it as I can. I sing a hero's head, large eye And bearded bronze, but not a man, Although I patch him as I can And reach through him almost to man. If to serenade almost to man Is to miss, by that, things as they are, Say that it is the serenade Of a man that plays a blue guitar. III Ah, but to play man number one, To drive the dagger in his heart, To lay his brain upon the board And pick the acrid colors out, To nail his thought across the door, Its wings spread wide to rain and snow, To strike his living hi and ho, To tick it, tock it, turn it true, To bang it from a savage blue, Jangling the metal of the strings... IV So that's life, then: things are they are? It picks its way on the blue guitar. A million people on one string? And all their manner in the thing, And all their manner, right and wrong, And all their manner, weak and strong? And that's life, then: things as they are, This buzzing of the blue guitar. V Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry, Of the torches wisping in the underground, Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light. There are no shadows in our sun, Day is desire and night is sleep. There are no shadows anywhere. The earth, for us, is flat and bare. There are no shadows. Poetry Exceeding music must take the place Of empty heaven and its hymns, Ourselves in poetry must take their place, Even in the chattering of your guitar. VI A tune beyond us as we are, Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar; Ourselves in the tune as if in space, Yet nothing changed, except the place Of things as they are and only the place As you play them, on the blue guitar, Placed so, beyond the compass of change, Perceived in a final atmosphere; For a moment final, in the way The thinking of art seems final when The thinking of god is smoky dew. The tune is space. The blue guitar Becomes the place of things as they are, A composing of senses of the guitar. VII It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea. When shall I come to say of the sun, It is a sea; it shares nothing; The sun no longer shares our works And the earth is alive with creeping men, Mechanical beetles never quite warm? And shall I then stand in the sun, as now I stand in the moon, and call it good, The immaculate, the merciful good, Detached from us, from things as they are? Not to be part of the sun? To stand Remote and call it merciful? The strings are cold on the blue guitar. VIII The vivid, florid, turgid sky, The drenching thunder rolling by, The morning deluged still by night, The clouds tumultuously bright And the feeling heavy in cold chords Struggling toward impassioned choirs, Crying among the clouds, enraged By gold antagonists in air-- I know my lazy, leaden twang Is like the reason in a storm; And yet it brings the storm to bear. I twang it out and leave it there. IX And the color, the overcast blue Of the air, in which the blue guitar Is a form, described but difficult, And I am merely a shadow hunched Above the arrowy, still string, The maker of a thing yet to be made; The color like a thought that grows Out of a mood, the tragic robe Of the actor, half his gesture, half His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk Sodden with his melancholy words, The weather of his stage, himself. X Raise reddest columns. Toll a bell And clap the hollows full of tin. Throw papers in the streets, the wills Of the dead, majestic in their seals. And the beautiful trombones -- behold The approach of him whom none believes, Whom all believe that all believe, A pagan in a varnished car. Roll a drum upon the blue guitar. Lean from the steeple. Cry aloud, "Here am I, my adversary, that Confront you, hoo-ing the slick trombones, Yet with a petty misery At heart, a petty misery, Ever the prelude to your end, The touch that topples men and rock." XI Slowly the ivy on the stones Becomes the stones. Women become The cities, children become the fields And men in waves become the sea. It is the chord that falsifies. The sea returns upon the men, The fields entrap the children, brick Is a weed and all the flies are caught, Wingless and withered, but living alive. The discord merely magnified. Deeper within the belly's dark Of time, time grows upon the rock. XII Tom-tom, c'est moi. The blue guitar And I are one. The orchestra Fills the high hall with shuffling men High as the hall. The whirling noise Of a multitude dwindles, all said, To his breath that lies awake at night. I know that timid breathing. Where Do I begin and end? And where, As I strum the thing, do I pick up That which momentously declares Itself not to be I and yet Must be. It could be nothing else. XIII The pale intrusions into blue Are corrupting pallors...ay di mi, Blue buds of pitchy blooms. Be content -- Expansions, diffusions -- content to be The unspotted imbecile revery, The heraldic center of the world Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins, The amorist Adjective aflame... XIV First one beam, then another, then A thousand are radiant in the sky. Each is both star and orb; and day Is the riches of their atmosphere. The sea appends its tattery hues. The shores are banks of muffling mist. One says a German chandelier -- A candle is enough to light the world. It makes it clear. Even at noon It glistens in essential dark. At night, it lights the fruit and wine, The book and bread, things as they are, In a chiaroscuro where One sits and plays the blue guitar. XV Is this picture of Picasso's, this "hoard Of destructions," a picture of ourselves, Now, an image of our society? Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg, Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon, Without seeing the harvest or the moon? Things as they are have been destroyed. Have I? Am I a man that is dead At a table on which the food is cold? Is my thought a memory, not alive? Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood And whichever it may be, is it mine? XVI The earth is not earth but a stone, Not the mother that held men as they fell But stone, but like a stone, no: not The mother, but an oppressor, but like An oppressor that grudges them their death, As it grudges the living that they live. To live in war, to live at war, To chop the sullen psaltery, To improve the sewers in Jerusalem, To electrify the nimbuses-- Place honey on the altars and die, You lovers that are bitter at heart. XVII The person has a mould. But not Its animal. The angelic ones Speak of the soul, the mind. It is An animal. The blue guitar-- On that its claws propound, its fangs Articulate its desert days. The blue guitar a mould? That shell? Well, after all, the north wind blows A horn, on which its victory Is a worm composing on a straw. XVIII A dream (to call it a dream) in which I can believe, in face of the object, A dream no longer a dream, a thing, Of things as they are, as the blue guitar After long strumming on certain nights Gives the touch of the senses, not of the hand, But the very senses as they touch The wind-gloss. Or as daylight comes, Like light in a mirroring of cliffs, Rising upward from a sea of ex. XIX That I may reduce the monster to Myself, and then may be myself In face of the monster, be more than part Of it, more than the monstrous player of One of its monstrous lutes, not be Alone, but reduce the monster and be, Two things, the two together as one, And play of the monster and of myself, Or better not of myself at all, But of that as its intelligence, Being the lion in the lute Before the lion locked in stone. XX What is there in life except one's ideas. Good air, good friend, what is there in life? Is it ideas that I believe? Good air, my only friend, believe, Believe would be a brother full Of love, believe would be a friend Friendlier than my only friend, Good air. Poor pale, poor pale guitar... XXI A substitute for all the gods: This self, not that gold self aloft, Alone, one's shadow magnified, Lord of the body, looking down, As now and called most high, The shadow of Chocorua In an immenser heaven, aloft, Alone, lord of the land and lord Of the men that live in the land, high lord. One's self and the mountains of one's land, Without shadows, without magnificence, The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone. XXII Poetry is the subject of the poem, From this the poem issues and To this returns. Between the two, Between issue and return, there is An absence in reality, Things as they are. Or so we say. But are these separate? Is it An absence for the poem, which acquires Its true appearances there, sun's green, Cloud's red, earth feeling, sky that thinks? From these it takes. Perhaps it gives, In the universal intercourse. XXIII A few final solutions, like a duet With the undertaker: a voice in the clouds, Another on earth, the one a voice Of ether, the other smelling of drink. The voice of ether prevailing, the swell Of the undertaker's song in the snow Apostrophizing wreaths, the voice In the clouds serene and final, next The grunted breath serene and final, The imagined and the real, thought And the truth, Dichtung und Wahrheit, all Confusion solved, as in a refrain One keeps on playing year by year, Concerning the nature of things as they are. XXIV A poem like a missal found In the mud, a missal for that young man, That scholar hungriest for that book, The very book, or, less, a page Or, at the least, a phrase, that phrase, A hawk of life, that latined phrase: To know; a missal for brooding-sight. To meet that hawk's eye and to flinch Not a the eye but at the joy of it. I play. But this is what I think. XXV He held the world upon his nose And this-a-way he gave a fling. His robes and symbols, ai-yi-yi -- And that-a-way he twirled the thing. Sombre as fir-trees, liquid cats Moved in the grass without a sound. They did not know the grass went round. The cats had cats and the grass turned gray And the world had worlds, ai, this-a-way: The grass turned green and the grass turned gray. And the nose is eternal, that-a-way. Things as they were, things as they are, Things as they will be by and by... A fat thumb beats out ai-yi-yi. XXVI The world washed in his imagination, The world was a shore, whether sound or form Or light, the relic of farewells, Rock, of valedictory echoings, To which his imagination returned, From which it sped, a bar in space, Sand heaped in the clouds, giant that fought Against the murderous alphabet: The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams Of inaccessible Utopia. A mountainous music always seemed To be falling and to be passing away. XXVII It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow. This gloom is the darkness of the sea. Geographers and philosophers, Regard. But for that salty cup, But for the icicles on the eaves -- The sea is a form of ridicule. The iceberg settings satirize The demon that cannot be himself, That tours to shift the shifting scene. XXVIII I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks, Gesu, not native of a mind Thinking the thoughts I call my own, Native, a native in the world And like a native think in it. It could not be a mind, the wave In which the watery grasses flow And yet are fixed as a photograph, The wind in which the dead leaves blow. Here I inhale profounder strength And as I am, I speak and move And things are as I think they are And say they are on the blue guitar. XXIX In the cathedral, I sat there, and read, Alone, a lean Review and said, "These degustations in the vaults Oppose the past and the festival. What is beyond the cathedral, outside, Balances with nuptial song. So it is to sit and to balance things To and to and to the point of still, To say of one mask it is like, To say of another it is like, To know that the balance does not quite rest, That the mask is strange, however like." The shapes are wrong and the sounds are false. The bells are the bellowing of bulls. Yet Franciscan don was never more Himself than in this fertile glass. XXX From this I shall evolve a man. This is his essence: the old fantoche Hanging his shawl upon the wind, Like something on the stage, puffed out, His strutting studied through centuries. At last, in spite of his manner, his eye A-cock at the cross-piece on a pole Supporting heavy cables, slung Through Oxidia, banal suburb, One-half of all its installments paid. Dew-dapper clapper-traps, blazing From crusty stacks above machines. Ecce, Oxidia is the seed Dropped out of this amber-ember pod, Oxidia is the soot of fire, Oxidia is Olympia. XXXI How long and late the pheasant sleeps... The employer and employee contend, Combat, compose their droll affair. The bubbling sun will bubble up, Spring sparkle and the cock-bird shriek. The employer and employee will hear And continue their affair. The shriek Will rack the thickets. There is no place, Here, for the lark fixed in the mind, In the museum of the sky. The cock Will claw sleep. Mourning is not sun, It is this posture of the nerves, As if a blunted player clutched The nuances of the blue guitar. It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are. XXXII Throw away the lights, the definitions, And say of what you see in the dark That it is this or that it is that, But do not use the rotted names. How should you walk in that space and know Nothing of the madness of space, Nothing of its jocular procreations? Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand Between you and the shapes you take When the crust of shape has been destroyed. You as you are? You are yourself. The blue guitar surprises you. XXXIII That generation's dream, aviled In the mud, in Monday's dirty light, That's it, the only dream they knew, Time in its final block, not time To come, a wrangling of two dreams. Here is the bread of time to come, Here is its actual stone. The bread Will be our bread, the stone will be Our bed and we shall sleep by night. We shall forget by day, except The moments when we choose to play The imagined pine, the imagined jay. //-- by Wallace Stevens//

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 * //__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Photostory Bibliography __//**

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