January 19, 2006
-
The Man Who Was Thursday:
An Introduction“Wallace Stevens’s remarkable oeuvre is a quasi-spiritual quest for the
supreme fiction, for a poetry that ‘must take the place / Of empty
heaven and its hymns’ and thus help modern man find meaning in a
godless world. The poet’s role, for Stevens, is that of high priest of
the imagination: it is the poet who ‘gives to life the supreme fictions
without which we are unable to conceive of it.’ ….
… Stevens’s hallmark ‘imagination-reality’ complex… is pursued
almost obsessively in his poetry and prose of the 1940s. Parts of a
World, published in 1942, and the poem-sequence of the same year,
‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’ (‘Notes’ was subsequently collected in
Transport to Summer in 1947), comprise a prolonged meditation in a time
of war on poetry and the poet’s role, in the face of what Stevens, in
his essay ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,’ terms ‘the pressure
of reality.’ Parts of a World is riven by its competing vocabularies. A
discourse of desire, of process, of the poet’s contemplation of the
mind in the act of finding what will suffice, is elaborated in ‘the
never-resting mind’ of ‘The Poems of Our Climate’ and in ‘The Well
Dressed Man with a Beard,’ in which ‘It can never be satisfied, the
mind, never’ [occurs]. A very different idiom, that of the ‘hero’ or ‘major
man,’ the figure of capable imagination, dominates and directs such
poems as ‘Mrs Alfred Uruguay,’ ‘Asides on the Oboe’ and ‘Examination of
the Hero in a Time of War,’ whereSummer, jangling
the savagest diamonds and
Dressed in its
azure-doubled crimsons,
May truly bear
its heroic fortunes
For the large,
the solitary figure.”– Lee M. Jenkins,
University College Cork,
“Wallace Stevens,”
The Literary Encyclopedia,
9 Dec., 2004.For some related serious, but less solemn, remarks, click on the above date.
