“Let’s see the very thing and nothing else. Of fragrance and the mind lays by its trouble.Īnd here we have that “eye grown larger…” To the first autumnal inhalations, young broodsĪre in the grass, the roses are heavy with a weight “Now in midsummer come and all fools slaughteredĪnd spring’s infuriations over and a long way These images and ideas are pursued in Transport of Summer in his long poem“Credences of Summer.” Written in 1947, the summer that followed the end of the war,when people might, as we now might, just for a moment, suspend disbelief and believe in the promises, the credences, of summer, when “the mind lays by its trouble” even as we know, as Stevens’ knew, in Shakespeare’s words, “summer’s lease has all too short a date.” We have, indeed, “gaiety of language” in these “Variations”. v.29-31)Īnd again an arresting musical image in canto VIII: ye are of more value than many sparrows.” (Matt: ch 10. “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? …. There is a tenderness in that last line that, for this reader,Ĭalls up those sparrows in the New Testament: The sparrow requites one, without intent.” The leaves of the sea are shaken and shaken. The title evokes a musical composition as much as a poem, the two being inextricably entwined in form and sound:Ī music more than breath, but less Than the wind, sub-music like sub-speech, The first of these poems is “Variations on a Summer Day,” written in 1942 and published in the same year in Parts of a World, a world shaken by the “violent disorder” of the Second World War. In a review of Transport of Summer in the New York Times in April 1947, F.O Matthiessen said that Wallace Stevens wrote his poems “against the realization that we live in a time of violent disorder” and that out of his imagination “a man can recreate afresh his world.” Matthiessen described Stevens as a poet who expressed such truths with “gaiety of language” and “with the mellowness and tang of a late-summer wine.” from The Necessary Angel, Essays on Reality and the Imagination ,1942) In his poems we see what Stevens called “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.” Poetry, imagination, he wrote “the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.” (“The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” last para. Throughout his career as a poet he explored, and questioned, the function and uses of poetry in the face of world disorder, seeking, and, as he wrote in the last line of his last poem, “Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself,” perhaps finding “A new knowledge of reality”. Stevens’ life was shaped by two World Wars and the Great Depression. Here, offered in tribute to James Longenbach on this one year anniversary of his death, is a look at three poems of summer by Wallace Stevens. Yeats, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, including The Plain Sense of Things, (Oxford University Press,1991) an in-depth study of Stevens. His later work focused on contemporary poets, but his earlier critical studies were of W.B. James Longenbach (1959-2022) a beloved member of our community, distinguished scholar, critic, teacher and poet, he was the author of many books of poetry and literary criticism. A Tribute to James Longenbach through the poetry of Wallace Stevens:
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