A dense reticulum of ideas, which unravels into a swarm of images and a cacophony of sounds but nevertheless maintains a fluid coherence: such is the world of Wallace Stevens, Modernist poet par excellence, a man of stoic temperament and intimidating...
[more]A dense reticulum of ideas, which unravels into a swarm of images and a cacophony of sounds but nevertheless maintains a fluid coherence: such is the world of Wallace Stevens, Modernist poet par excellence, a man of stoic temperament and intimidating intelligence. With a daunting arsenal of unfamiliar words that threaten to sink the reader in chaos, Stevens orchestrates a tenuous logic, a logic that retains an intimate relation to the tumultuous din of existence. Indeed, Stevens' poetry resides at a fragile, delicate edge between meaning and sound, a point where the transparent univocality of ideas becomes clouded with the thick materiality of noise.
Confusion mixes with clarity here -- but Stevens' poems are never random or adventitious. Carefully focused, they betray a fastidious attention to design. Which is to say that Stevens affirms chaos even as he composes it. Loose associations, spurious metaphors, and words chosen for their sounds all contribute to the discreet poetic shape. The poems emerge like a shifting architecture from a fluid fundament: "The joy of meaning in design/Wrenched out of chaos."
By "meaning in design," Stevens' does not intend a universal truth, clear and distinct. Far from representing the world, his poems are transfigurations of it. Thus, in his playful poem "The Man with the Blue Guitar," he likens the creation of meaning to a song played on an eccentric instrument. "You have a blue guitar," an interlocutor challenges, "You do not play things as they are." Of course the man with the blue guitar replies, "Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar." A blue guitar indeed, on which all existence is played: this is the instrument of Wallace Stevens.
While the stubborn realist labors to speak the world as it is, Stevens plays his peculiarly colored music. He does not, however, allow his language to unravel entirely into errant associations, fleeting images, or a senseless slur of proliferating syllables. Without renouncing the play of these very associations, images, and sounds, he creates discreet, ideational shapes. The result is a meticulously composed poetry, a poetry of fluid forms that maintain their integrity even as they ooze and seep.
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