Wallace Stevens's Heroic Aesthetic Humanism

Among the most perceptive readings of Wallace Stevens's "philosophical" position--what his mentor, George Santayana, termed a "vital philosophy"--was Stevens's friend Hi Simons's review of the volume Parts of a World in the journal Poetry [Vol. 61, No. 2 (Nov., 1942), pp. 448-452].

Simons opened his review with the following observation:

"Mr. Wallace Stevens is one of the few living poets who have constructed, each of them, a complete world for his imagination to inhabit. Minor men, half-poets, write out of more or less temporary adjustments between their personalities and their environments. Stevens writes from a unique, whole vision of life, that is revealed in Parts of a World."

This constructed world of the imagination is the poet's way of negotiating the ever-present pressures of "reality"--which is, for Stevens, the wild and unreasoning chaos that threatens, at every moment, to bring the beautiful vision of the poet to rack and ruin.

The heroism of the Stevensian poet lies in his courageous acceptance of this, the human predicament: he does not resent "reality" for what it is, nor does he harbor any illusions that, some day, he may tame it. Instead, he learns to ride the unbroken stallion that is life in this world and to discover, in the venture, beauties previously unimagined that may now enrich his imagination further. This heroism ennobles the poet and, as Simons rightly notes, he becomes a symbol for "... a conviction that life must be nobly lived to be worth living." That conviction (or, as Simon styles it, "feeling") "pervades the finest poems of reflection and the most intense lyrics in Parts of a World. It gives its tone to Stevens' humanism, a humanism with an aesthetic instead of a moralistic basis, more yea-saying and better-humored than the humanism of Babbitt and More that went flat, a philosophy whose author can say, 'What more is there to love than I have loved?', an attitude insistently contemporary that yet makes place among contemporary tensions for a conception of noble living and noble imagining."

Volumes have been written about Stevens's poetry, his life, his legal thought and practice, etc. Volumes more will surely be written. But Simons's four page review of Parts of a World caught the drift of Stevens's poetic project even while it was still in progress and distilled it for posterity.

Quite a critical accomplishment: especially in light of the stubborn difficulty of the work of the poet in question.

Dick Davis, Poet and Translator: A Life Well-Lived

An interview with Dick Davis.

James Baldwin: the Price of the Ticket

A Great American Original

Johnny Cash: his last video with insightful commentary by family and friends.

Muslim Women in the American South

Some look like this...

Others, like this...

Once I could speak joyfully about beautiful things...

Once I could speak joyfully about beautiful things, thinking to be understood;--now I cannot any more; for it seems to me that no one regards them. Wherever I look or travel in England or abroad, I see that men, wherever they can reach, destroy all beauty. They seem to have no other desire or hope but to have large houses and to be able to move fast. Every perfect and lovely spot which they can touch, they defile.

--John Ruskin, Modern Painters, V (1860)

Kronos Quartet - Wa Habibi

A Mind of Winter

To behold nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.

The Deep Heart's Core

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)

A Stevens Enchiridion

Although I resisted the Library of America's Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose for many years due to an emotional attachment to my tattered old editions of The Collected Poems, The Palm at the End of the Mind, The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words, and the Letters, I have come to feel that the LOA edition deserves to become the enchiridion for all who wish to learn to "speak" Stevens. That is, for those who wish to study his work carefully, chronologically, and comprehensively, if not completely--the better to absorb him and to make his vocabulary and poetic sensibility a part of one's own.

Stevens was, and remains, a difficult poet. But the blade of the intellect is sharpened upon the whetstone of difficult texts. To become learned in Stevens is to catechize oneself in the Religion of Beauty. Around Stevens, one should read Ruskin and Pater, Santayana and Proust, Hemingway, Nietzsche, Joyce, Nabokov, Kenneth Burke, Whitman, Emerson, Oscar Wilde and, eventually, Lucretius, Rumi and Kabir, and much else besides.

Nevertheless, allow the LOA Stevens to serve as an anchor to the rest of your reading and you will not lose your way in the labyrinth.

Jack London's "Instinctive Mysticism"

In his 1974 book, Jack London, Earle Labor spoke of the "instinctive mysticism" that dominates London's tales of the north country. Here is a famous passage from the short story "White Silence":

The afternoon wore on, and with the awe, born of the White Silence, the voiceless travelers bent to their work. Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity--the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of the storm, the shock of the earthquake, the long roll of heaven's artillery--but the most tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice. Sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world, he trembles at his audacity, realizes that his is a maggot's life, nothing more. Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the mystery of all things strives for utterance. And the fear of death, of God, of the universe, comes over him--the hope of the Resurrection and the Life, the yearning for immortality, the vain striving of the imprisoned essence--it is then, if ever, man walks alone with God.