Thursday, October 2, 2014

Wallace Stevens birth anniversary

Wallace Stevens | HiLobrow


 Wallace Stevens via hilobrow.com

Stevens led what is now celebrated as a quiet personal life: though he once reportedly took a swing at Ernest Hemingway during a Key West fracas, he refused a post at Harvard after winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1955 in order to stay in Hartford. Maybe the citizens of that dull burg better appreciated that a sidewalk ice-cream monarch is “the only emperor” in this fallen realm of ours.

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.



via poetryfoundation.org


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