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Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

1879-10-02 Reading, Pensilvânia, EUA
1955-08-02 Hartford, Connecticut, EUA
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Some Poems

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The Snow Man

The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm

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 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.
They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

The Plot Against the Giant

The Plot Against the Giant
First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.
Second Girl
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.
Third Girl
Oh, la...le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.

Anecdote of the Jar

Anecdote of the Jar
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) --but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.

Gray Room

Gray Room
Although you sit in a room that is gray,
Except for the silver
Of the straw-paper,
And pick
At your pale white gown;
Or lift one of the green beads
Of your necklace,
To let it fall;
Or gaze at your green fan
Printed with the red branches of a red willow;
Or, with one finger,
Move the leaf in the bowl--
The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia
Beside you...
What is all this?
I know how furiously your heart is beating.
Wallace Stevens documentary
19. Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens: His Life and Work
HaroldBloom - On The Auroras of Autumn by Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens as an American Poet
Mini-Lecture on Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man"
Modern-ish Poets: Wallace Stevens (short)
The Auroras of Autumn
Bill Murray Reads Wallace Stevens
20. Wallace Stevens (cont.)
Harold Bloom reciting Wallace Stevens' "Tea at the Palace of Hoon"
Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens (ENG)
Harold Bloom reads and free associates on Wallace Stevens' verse. (May 16, 1983)
Wallace Stevens "The Idea of Order at Key West" POEM
The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens reads Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour
Wallace Stevens reads So & So Reclining on Her Couch
Harold Bloom, “Art of Reading a Poem,” “The Poems of Our Climate” by Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens - The Idea of Order at Key West
A Final Seriousness: Wallace Stevens' Late Poems Revisited
REEL TIME: Helen Vendler on the Recordings of Wallace Stevens - Woodberry Poetry Room
Wallace Stevens: Words That Matter
21. Wallace Stevens (cont.)
"Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens (read by Tom O'Bedlam)
"The Emperor of Ice-Cream" by Wallace Stevens (read by Tom O'Bedlam)
Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
The World of Wallace Stevens Trailer (First 7 minutes)
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens (read by Tom O'Bedlam)
Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens | Structure, Summary, Analysis
Wallace Stevens reads his poem "The Idea Of Order At Key West" ( 1934 )...a video by Frank Iosue.
Credences of Summer
The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens (read by Tom O'Bedlam)
Understanding "The Emperor of Ice Cream," Part 1
"The Man with the Blue Guitar" by Wallace Stevens (read by Tom O'Bedlam)
Introducing Wallace Stevens
Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens
Robert Hass: Wallace Stevens Award Reading
The Wallace Stevens Walk
Wallace Stevens reads "The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain."
The Emperor of Ice-Cream by Wallace Stevens
On Wallace Stevens's "Large Red Man Reading"
"Of Mere Being" by Wallace Stevens, read by Maitreyabandhu | Pop Up Retreat Poem 4
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens (short biography)full name, date of birth, work etc
"The Idea of Order at Key West" by Wallace Stevens (read by Tom O'Bedlam)
Literary Birthday Celebration: Wallace Stevens
"Domination of Black" by Wallace Stevens
Poetry Thursday: Wallace Stevens!
The Snowman by Wallace Stevens | Structure, Summary, Analysis
Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens read by A Poetry Channel

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