If you've read any Wallace Stevens, the above quote doesn't sound like something he's say (though he did). The guy wrote "The Emperor of Ice Cream," for cryin' out loud.
But one way to think about Steven's poetry is through the lens of our relationship with the physical world, how human perception shapes our experience of our world.
If you're having trouble with Stevens, you're not alone. I spend my 20's trying to read him, failing to connect with any of his poems, and writing him off as some abstract/surrealist that didn't share any of my concerns, poetry and otherwise.
But then I found this poem:
Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.
That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
I won't go into too much detail here, but I will say that after hearing Stevens read this, a lot of his other poems that had spent years baffling me just sorta clicked. Stevens is certainly a poet of ideas. And this idea fits in fairly comfortably with "Modernist" poetry. William Carlos Williams, who we'll get to in a bit, expressed a similar sentiment when he said "No ideas but in things."
In this poem, Stevens is very concerned with a thing, but it doesn't try to communicate a description--that would contradict the idea that's he's working with. We'll talk about about Stevens and this poem in class, but I wanted to get it to you here in case it helps you like it helped me.
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