The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens (PDF)

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This definitive poetry collection, originally published in 1954 to honor Stevens on his 75th birthday, contains:- “Harmonium”- “Ideas of Order”- “The Man With the Blue Guitar”- “Parts of the World”- “Transport Summer”- “The Auroras of Autumn”- “The Rock”

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review Academic Discourse At Havana Add This To Rhetoric Adult Epigram The American Sublime Analysis Of A Theme Anatomy Of Monotony Anecdote Of Canna Anecdote Of Men By The Thousand Anecdote Of The Jar Anecdote Of The Prince Of Peacocks Angel Surrounded By Paysans Anglais Mort A Florence Another Weeping Woman Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is The Apostrophe To Vincentine Arcades Of Philadelphia The Past Arrival At The Waldorf Asides On The Oboe Attempt To Discover Life The Auroras Of Autumn Autumn Refrain The Bagatelles The Madrigals Banal Sojourn Bantams In Pine-woods The Bed Of Old John Zeller The Beginning The Bird With The Coppery, Keen Claws The Blue Buildings In The Summer Air Botanist On Alp (n.1) Botanist On Alp (no.2) The Bouquet Bouquet Of Belle Scavoir Bouquet Of Roses In Sunlight The Brave Man Burghers Of Petty Death The Candle A Saint Celle Qui Fut Heaulmiette Certain Phenomena Of Sound Chaos In Motion And Not In Motion Chocorua To Its Neighbor Colloquy With A Polish Aunt The Comedian As The Letter C The Common Life A Completely New Set Of Objects Connoisseur Of Chaos Continual Conversation With A Silent Man Contrary Theses (i) Contrary Theses (ii) Cortege For Rosenbloom Country Words The Countryman Cousine Bourgeoise The Creations Of Sound Credences Of Summer Crude Foyer The Cuban Doctor The Curtains In The House Of The Metaphysician Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, Et Les Unze Mille… Dance Of The Macabre Mice The Death Of A Soldier Debris Of Life And Mind Delightful Evening Depression Before Spring Description Without Place Dezembrum A Dish Of Peaches In Russia Disillusionment Of Ten O’clock The Doctor Of Geneva Domination Of Black The Dove In The Belly Dry Loaf Dutch Graves In Bucks County The Dwarf Earthy Anecdote The Emperor Of Ice-cream Esthetique Du Mal Evening Without Angels Examination Of The Hero In A Time Of War Explanation Extracts From Addresses To The Academy Of Fine Ideas Extraordinary References Fabliau Of Florida A Fading Of The Sun Farewell To Florida Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour A Fish-scale Sunrise Floral Decorations For Bananas Flyer’s Fall Forces, The Will & The Weather Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes… From The Misery Of Don Joost From The Packet Of Anacharsis Gallant Chateau Ghosts As Cocoons Gigantomachia Girl In A Nightgown The Glass Of Water God Is Good. It Is A Beautiful Night A Golden Woman In A Silver Mirror The Good Man Has No Shape Gray Stones And Gray Pigeons The Green Plant Gubbinal The Hand As A Being The Hermitage At The Centre Hibiscus On The Sleeping Shores A High-toned Old Christian Woman Holiday In Reality Homunculus Et La Belle Etoile The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm How To Live What To Do Human Arrangement Hymn From A Watermelon Pavilion The Idea Of Order At Key West Idiom Of The Hero Imago In A Bad Time In The Carolinas In The Clear Season Of Grapes In The Element Of Antagonisms Indian River Infanta Marina Invective Against Swans The Irish Cliffs Of Moher The Jack-rabbit Jasmines’s Beautiful Thoughts Underneath The Willow Jouga Jumbo The Lack Of Repose Landscape With Boat Large Red Man Reading Last Looks At The Lilacs Late Hymn From The Myrrh-mountain The Latest Freed Man Le Monocle De Mon Oncle Lebensweisheitspielerei Les Plus Belles Pages Less And Less Human, O Savage Spirit Life Is Motion Like Decorations In A Nigger Cemetery Lions In Sweden The Load Of Sugar-cane Loneliness In Jersey City Long And Sluggish Lines Looking Across The Fields And Watching The Birds Fly A Lot Of People Bathing In A Stream Lunar Paraphrase Madame La Fleurie Man And Bottle Man Carrying Thing The Man On The Dump The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad The Man With The Blue Guitar Martial Cadenza Meditation Celestial & Terrestrial Men Made Out Of Words The Men That Are Falling Metamorphosis Metaphor As Degeneration Metaphors Of A Magnifico Montrachet-le-jardin The Motive For Metaphor Mountains Covered With Cats Mozart, 1935 Mrs. Alfred Uruguay Mud Master Negation New England Verses The News And The Weather No Possum, No Sop, No Taters Nomad Exquisite Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself Note On Moonlight Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction: Conclusion Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction: It Must Be Abstract Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction: It Must Change Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction: It Must Give Pleasure Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction: Prelude The Novel Nuances Of A Theme By Williams Nudity At The Capital Nudity In The Colonies O Florida, Venereal Soil Oak Leaves Are Hands Of Bright & Blue Birds & The Gala Sun Of Hartford In A Purple Light Of Heaven Considered As A Tomb Of Modern Poetry Of The Surface Of Things The Old Lutheran Bells At Home An Old Man Asleep On An Old Horn On The Adequacy Of Landscape On The Manner Of Addressing Clouds On The Road Home One Of The Inhabitants Of The West An Ordinary Evening In New Haven The Ordinary Women Our Stars Come From Ireland The Owl In The Sarcophagus Page From A Tale Paisant Chronicle Palace Of The Babies The Paltry Nude Starts On A Spring Voyage Parochial Theme The Pastor Caballero A Pastoral Nun The Pediment Of Appearance Peter Quince At The Clavier Phosphor Reading By His Own Light Pieces The Place Of The Solitaires The Plain Sense Of Things The Planet On The Table The Pleasures Of Merely Circulating The Plot Against The Giant The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain Poem With Rhythms Poem Written At Morning The Poems Of Our Climate Poesie Abrutie Poetry Is A Destructive Force A Postcard From The Volcano The Prejudice Against The Past Prelude To Objects A Primitive Like And Orb Prologues To What Is Possible The Public Square Puella Parvula The Pure Good Of Theory Questions Are Remarks A Quiet Normal Life A Rabbit As King Of The Ghosts Re-statement Of Romance The Reader The Red Fern Repetitions Of A Young Captain Reply To Papini The Revolutionist Stop For Orangeade The River Of Rivers In Connecticut The Rock Sad Strains Of A Gay Waltz Sailing After Lunch Saint John And The Back-ache Sea Surface Full Of Clouds The Search For Sound Free From Motion The Sense Of The Sleight-of-hand Man Six Significant Landscapes Sketch Of The Ultimate Politician Snow And Stars The Snow Man So-and-so Reclining On Her Couch Some Friends From Pascagoula Somnambulisma Sonatina To Hans Christian Song Of Fixed Accord St. Armorer’s Church From The Outside Stars At Tallapoosa Study Of Images 1 Study Of Images 2 Study Of Two Pears The Sun This March Sunday Morning The Surprises Of The Superhuman Tattoo Tea Tea At The Palaz Of Hoon Theory Things Of August Thinking Of A Relation Between The Images Of Methaphors Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird This Solitude Of Cataracts A Thought Revolved Thunder By The Musician To An Old Philosopher In Rome To The One Of Fictive Music To The Roaring Wind Two At Norfolk Two Figures In Dense Violet Light Two Illustrations That The World Is What You Make Of It Two Tales Of Liadoff Two Versions Of The Same Poem, That Which Cannot Be Fixed: 1 Two Versions Of The Same Poem, That Which Cannot Be Fixed: 1 The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract United Dames Of America Vacancy In The Park Valley Candle Variations On A Summer Day The Virgin Carrying A Lantern Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu A Weak Mind In The Mountains The Weeping Burgher The Well Dressed Man With A Beard What We See Is What We Think Wild Ducks, People And Distances The Wind Shifts Winter Bells The Woman In Sunshine Woman Looking At A Vase Of Flowers A Woman Sings A Song For A Soldier Come Home A Word With Jose Rodriguez-feo The World As Meditation World Without Peculiarity The Worms At Heaven’s Gate Yellow Afternoon — Table of Poems from Poem Finder® From the Inside Flap This definitive poetry collection, originally published in 1954 to honor Stevens on his 75th birthday, contains:- “Harmonium”- “Ideas of Order”- “The Man With the Blue Guitar”- “Parts of the World”- “Transport Summer”- “The Auroras of Autumn”- “The Rock” About the Author Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1879, and died in Hartford, Connecticut, on August 2, 1955. Although he had contributed to the Harvard Advocate while in college, he began to gain general recognition only when Harriet Monroe included four of his poems in a sepcial 1914 wartime issue of Poetry. Harmonium, his first volume of poems, was published in 1923, and was followed by Ideas of Order (1936), The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), Parts of a World (1942), Transport to Summer (1947), The Auroras of Autumn (1950), The Necessary Angel (a volume of essays, 1951), The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1954), and Opus Posthumous (first published in 1957, edited by Samuel Frued Morse; a new, revised, and corrected edition by Milton J. Bates, 1989). Mr. Stevens was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry of the Yale University Library for 1949. In 1951 he won the National Book Award in Poetry for The Auroras of Autumn, in 1955 he won it a second time for The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, which was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1955. From 1916 on, he was associated with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, of which he became vice president in 1934. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Snow ManOne must have a mind of winterTo regard the frost and the boughsOf the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long timeTo behold the junipers shagged with ice,The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to thinkOf any misery in the sound of the wind,In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the landFull of the same windThat is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,And, nothing himself, beholdsNothing that is not there and the nothing that is. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Good quality, gress as t timing

⭐This is the type of book I read at 3 am when I can’t sleep. Stevens’ poetry just makes me feel so calm, even though the content in his poetry is not in fact anywhere near the realms of calm. Overall, I would say, the content is hard-hitting. I’m not going to pretend I understand all of his ideas and everything he says- I definitely don’t. A lot of these poems leave me feeling like an idiot. But when I am able to figure something out, it all starts to click and I am left with a lump in my throat. Although I don’t necessarily understand everything when it comes to this collection, I think that it is a good thing. It just shows the high level of his talent manages to knock me off my feet.Well, anyway, I got my first peak of this collection at uni. I was so intrigued by it that I bought it during winter break. While reading it I found out one of my professors is an editor of the edition that I bought. Rad. But also, the thing is, (and I have thought this many times before,) uni can only teach you so many things. I learned much more about Stevens’ poetry by reading it myself than what I learned from uni. Like, without reading basically this whole collection, I would have never learned that Stevens is, for the most part, a Romantic. He’s a lot like Wordsworth, I think. He inherits so many of the Romantic feelings, ideas and philosophies but he still manages to stay modern at the same time. I am obsessed with the Romantic poets so in my mind, that’s what makes him stand out. I love the fact that he manages to tie modernism and Romanticism together, it is a real treat for me to read. Even though it’s not really talked about, I would say my favorite poem of his is “Another Weeping Woman”. It is so quick and beautiful and earnest and a good poem to read when you lose one of your loved ones.Over the past couple of years I have really warmed up to poetry. I’m not a huge American lit person in general but I always tell people that Stevens is one of my favorites, if not my favorite American poet. Everything about his work seems so personal, like when you’re reading it, it feels like he is speaking directly to you. It feels so natural but honestly nothing about reading his poetry is easy. It is tough to figure out. But I enjoyed taking the time to sit down and try to hypothesize all that is going on in his works. He is dark, so dark and yet manages to feel so light, so beautiful. He delivers the best of both worlds in my eyes and that’s why I will revisit this collection again and again and again. It never stops being so hideous and so beautiful at the same time.

⭐I had expected a large size book, but this is quite small. No room for my notes. But am keeping.

⭐The meditative quality, exquisite imagery and concise & precise use of language bolsters Wallace Stevens as one of the finest & greatest poets in 20th century. Wallace’s control over English and more generally the poetic style itself are best represented in his group of poems The Man with the Blue Guitar. There are no self-indulgent, instinctive, overgrown lines seen in other poets’ work such as Alan Ginsberg and Derek Walcott. And later generation of poets such as John Ashbery are greatly influenced by Wallace’s work. This again indicates the immense value of this collection to global literature progression.

⭐I first “discovered” Stevens from selections of some of his work being a part of this work on poetics I have. The quotes are, I suppose, for the oddity of discovering an artist that is more well known than I’ll ever be. Great book to have if you’re interested in how poetry made its move from constrained to open.

⭐Stevens is difficult to understand, but he has much to say. If you can find a course on Stevens, it will make reading him more worthwhile. It’s all there — he’s terrific. And this is the book to own.

⭐Finally the poems as Stevens meant them to be. The old edition we all have was raced through publication in time for his 75th birthday (which he was not quite able to make) and was riddled with errors. Now they’ve been meticulously corrected.

⭐Thank you to the publisher for an ebook copy of Stevens’ work. My ancient paperback copy is now retired. As for the poetry: my respectful suggestion is to read it and not feel obliged to understand it. Reading a poem isn’t a contest you have to win. Let the music of the words wash over you. Float. You don’t have to bring anything to this party except your willingness to be surprised, the way you’re sometimes surprised, on waking, by a dream you had. Happy reading, whatever you choose to read.

⭐Of all the books packed into a house from a lifetime’s reading, this one has to be the most simply and directly beautiful that I own. It has taken me almost a month of patient, careful decryption to make my painstaking way to the end. But having completed it I returned straight away to the beginning and read aloud, in the bath, as I do, the first 50 pages and struggled to recall what made it seem so obscure and difficult first time through. The central theme for Stevens is always pleasure. Even in the occasional more darkly hued winter poems or those that allude to war there remains the fundamental sense of the goodness of life, of the miraculous goodness of consciousness situated in a world made available to it through a sensory imagination. In one particularly famous poem, Towards a Supreme Fiction, Stevens makes clear the essence of his process in a simple formula; 1) It must be abstract, 2) It must change and 3) It must give pleasure. And this indeed is the final key to understanding him.Tackling Stevens has undoubtedly been a major lifetime reading experience. It took me a while and a little bit of googling for help with a couple of his poems before I got the hang of how to read him. He is by far the most transparently philosophical, metaphysical in the technical sense, poet I have read thus far. Reading Stevens is a lot like reading Kant, and when you unravel him it amounts to much the same concerns. It is however a much more directly rewarding experience than reading Kant.To read him, each clause of each sentence must be carefully weighed for all its possible meanings and then related to the last and earlier clauses to determine how it might modulate them. Then one must check for what might be expected as a probable next clause in order to be surprised when that frequently fails to occur. His poems are a music made from sparkling images connected by a stuttering logic that generates clouds or haloes of meanings rather than any single, determinate interpretation.Ideally impersonal as many poets have thought they should be, there is no I in Stevens. Other people appear, when they do, as objects in a world of objects. Thoughts live and breathe in constantly evolving relation to objects, each generating the other, a la Kant, thoughts having people rather than the way round we are constructed to presume.There is no moral or ethical judgment. Bad things and bad feelings are there, but are just objects like the others down in this metaphysical bedrock. Some people have evidently found Stevens’ serene detachment disquieting or unacceptable, but as one who feels the sorrows of the world all too keenly I find him to be a soothing balm, and a brief but welcome respite, somewhat akin to Mozart. Stevens famously replied to such a critic that after a revolution an apple would still be just as round and just as red. Aesthetic values are pervasive throughout it all as the firmly embedded assumption that everything really is beautiful and exactly as it is meant to be.I have had several intense love affairs with particular poets and it is gratifying that Stevens should come along at this time of life and remind me of that blessed intensity.

⭐Unter den vielen ungewöhnlichen Menschen, die uns begegnen, wenn wir uns mit Lyrik beschäftigen, ist Wallace Stevens vielleicht der ungewöhnlichste. Weil er so unglaublich gewöhnlich wirkt. Zwar: In jüngeren Jahren verbunden mit amerikanischen Avantgardisten. Doch vor allem: Versicherungsagent. Und nach der Enttäuschung über den schlechten Verkauf seines ersten Gedichtbandes, erst im Alter von 41 Jahren veröffentlicht, vor allem mit einem Traum ausgestattet: In der Versicherungsagentur aufsteigen. 1934 wird er Vizepräsident. Ein Lebenswerk ist praktisch abgeschlossen. Von herausragenden Ereignissen im Leben Stevens wird nicht berichtet, nicht mal von größeren Reisen.Aber die Texte, die in dieser Zeit entstehen und erst Beachtung finden, als der Dichter schon ein bereits recht hohes Alter erreicht hat! Harold Bloom hält sie für mit das Größte, das die englischsprachige Literatur überhaupt hervorgebracht hat. Stevens zieht Bloom Eliot weit vor, den er allerdings sowieso nicht allzu sehr zu schätzen scheint, obwohl er an der Größe von The Wasteland nicht ganz vorbeikommt. Soweit möchte ich nicht gehen. Was in Stevens Werk schmerzlich vermisst wird, ist ein kohärenter Großtext, eines dieser Werke, das in der Bändigung großer Stoffmaassen schier überwältigt. Nicht, dass Stevens nicht Texte verfasst hätte, die ähnlich lang sind, wie Eliots Wasteland. Doch je weiter Stevens ausgereift, desto konventioneller wird er. Da wird die Strophenform dominant und nur noch Idee an Idee gereiht. Reime halten das Ganze mehr schlecht als recht zusammen, und manches wäre vielleicht gesungen ganz nett, gelesen ermüdet es. Eine Art und Weise, größere Textmengen tatsächlich zu strukturieren geht Stevens ebenso ab wie dem viel später tätigen Jan Wagner. Da frönt er einem hemmungslosen Vertikalismus, wenn überhaupt, oder lässt alle Zügel schleifen.Auch die kleineren Werke wirken auf den ersten Blick traditionell. Recht geregelt anmutende Strophenformen sind fast immer, Reime die meiste Zeit anwesend. Doch das ist nur die Oberfläche, unter der Stevens mit größter Freiheit gestaltet. Schon allein wie gereimt wird. Nur äußerst selten noch nach irgendeinem „klassischen“ Regelsystem, und dennoch in den wirklich gelungenen Gedichten nie so, dass man sagen würde „die Reime sitzen aber willkürlich“. Und allein die ausgewählten Reimworte machen immer wieder staunen und lassen durch die Selbstverständlichkeit, mit der der Autor höchst Erlesenes, Abseitigstes aus den Sphären scholastischer Philosophie, Botanik, Politik, Naturwissenschaft (um nur einige von unzähligen Feldern zu nennen) auf das Alltäglichste reimt, Reime manchmal regelrecht in sich dissonant wirken. Auch mit echten Assonanzen und Dissonanzen, einer sorgsamen Unterwanderung der erwarteten Klangstruktur, arbeitet Stevens virtuos. Zudem dürfte er zu den Dichtern mit dem größten nur denkbaren Wortschatz gelten, und selten wirkt die Art und Weise, wie er aus diesem schöpft, unangemessen, prätentiös.Paradoxerweise dürfte Stevens weit mehr als Elliot, der die entsprechende Forderung aufstellte, als ein moderne Fortsetzung der Metaphysical Poetry gelten, die Eliott im berühmten Essay so lobte. Das Gießen disparater Gedanken in Bilder, die zu einem so verstörenden wie überzeugenden Ganzen verwoben werden, darin bringt es Stevens zu solch großer Meisterschaft, das selbst Donne noch zu ihm Aufsehen dürfte. Wo Eliot die Schwere der Themen mit komplexer, aber oft geradezu schwebender Form verbindet, hat die an so viel Tradition anklingende, auf dem ersten Blick so typisch nach traditioneller Dichtung aussehende Form Stevens eher mehr „Gewicht“. Und scheint dann doch wieder leicht durch das Schwere zu tanzen. Es ist kaum zu beschreiben. Doch in seinen besseren Texten wirkt Stevens wie ein Donne, der ins 20. Jahrhundert versetzt wurde, seine Umwelt gedanklich durchdringt, jedoch sich nie ganz zu Hause fühlt, und es nebenbei zu großer Meisterschaft im Ballett gebracht hat, was wieder auf die Dichtung durchschlägt.Nun aber: Schauen wir uns einen text an. Ich habe „Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz“ ausgewählt, das mit seinem Kreisen um Musik recht gut zu einem anderen Schwerpunkt meiner Beschäftigung mit Ästhetik passt. Dass es in diesem Text, wie in der von mir schon öfter bemühten Frage Adornos „“Wie kann ein Ganzes sein, ohne dass dem Einzelnen Gewalt angetan wird?“ von Anfang an nicht allein um Musik geht, legen die ersten vier Zeilen jedoch schon nahe:The truth is that there comes a timeWhen we can mourn no more over musicThat is so much motionless sound.There comes a time when the waltzIs no longer a mode of desire, a modeOf revealing desire and is empty of shadows.Too many waltzes have ended. And thenThere’s that mountain-minded Hoon,For whom desire was never that of the waltz,Who found all form and order in solitude,For whom the shapes were never the figures of men.Now, for him, his forms have vanished.Hier klingt mit der Musik eine Sorge um Verfall an, ob einer Zeit, in der Musik nicht mehr einfach als Musik genossen werden kann. Ein erster Ausbruch ist der „mountain-minded Hoon“, der sich in ein Eremitendasein zurückzieht, um den Preis, dass für ihn nach dem anfänglichen Finden von Ordnung in Einsamkeit irgendwann überhaupt keine Form mehr ist. Was „Hoon“ Stevens bedeutet konnte ich dabei beim besten Willen nicht in Erfahrung bringen (Die australische Bedeutung scheint mir nicht passend).Dann, wie aus heiterem Himmel, nein, aus formlose Einsamkeit heraus, weitet das Gedicht sich auffallend:There is order in neither sea nor sun.The shapes have lost their glistening.Das zugleich Stete, dauerhaft Bewegte – die zwei großen Taktgeber des Lebens auf der Erde, See und Sonne – auch in ihnen ist keine Ordnung mehr zu finden. Bewusst oder unbewusst scheint eine Ahnung davon auf, wie gesellschaftlich Natur ist. Die Flucht aus dem, was in den ersten Strophen den unschuldigen Musikgenuss verbaut, hinein in „ewige“ Ordnungen ist verstellt. Und dann plötzlich:There are these sudden mobs of men,Heute denke ich bei dieser Zeile natürlich sofort an neuere Proteste und Straßenkämpfe. An die größeren rechtsradikalen Aufmärsche der vergangenen Jahre, an Menschen, die sich jetzt vermehrt gegen Diskriminierung erheben. An die reale Möglichkeit, dass immer deutlicher werdende Antagonismen auch wieder vermehrt gewaltsam ausgetragen werden. Nun erschien Stevens Gedicht 1936 in seinem zweiten Band “Ideas of Order”, und so kann ich nur spekulieren, dass sich hier Erfahrungen aus dem Umfeld der Großen Depression niederschlagen. In jedem Fall scheinen die „sudden mobs of men“ nicht einfach nur bedrohlich, sondern irgendwie auch berechtig: Einem ganz basalen Streben nach Glück folgend Für sie sind bürgerliche Kammermusik, Walzertanz usf. nichts, das überhaupt in ihre Lebenssphäre fallen könnte und Glück oder auch nur Zufreidenheit bedingen:These sudden clouds of faces and arms,An immense suppression, freed,These voices crying without knowing for what,Except to be happy, without knowing how,Imposing forms they cannot describe,Requiring order beyond their speech.Und dann führt Stevens die beiden zuvor weitgehend getrennten Sphären geistig zusammen:Too many waltzes have ended. Yet the shapesFor which the voices cry, these, too, may beModes of desire, modes of revealing desire.Too many waltzes – The epic of disbeliefBlares oftener and soon, will soon be constant.Some harmonious sceptic soon in a sceptical musicWill unite these figures of men and their shapesWill glisten again with motion, the musicWill be motion and full of shadows.Und obwohl Stevens ab den Dreißigern zu den konservativeren Dichtern gezählt wird, später sogar regelrecht reaktionär wird, geschieht das nicht, indem der bürgerliche Genuss hoch gehalten wird, der Aufstand erniedrigt. Sondern nicht weniger wird anvisiert als eine ganz neue Musik. Und eine ganz neue Musik, wissen wir, weiß sicher auch Stevens, ist gar nicht denkbar ohne eine neue Gesellschaft.Was ich zum traditionellen Äußeren der Gedichte Stevens gesagt habe, trifft auch hier voll zu. Zehn dreizeiler von relativ gleichmäßiger Silbenlänge. Ein geregelt wirkendes Gedicht, dem man dennoch an merkt, dass es nicht mehr in einer wirklich klassischen Form verfasst ist. Gereimt wird einmal mehr sporadisch. „Then“ Am Anfang der dritten Strophe wird von „men“ im Zentrum der vierten aufgegriffen. „Sun“ klingt daran in der fünften noch an und Stevens hat keine Skrupel, direkt darauf hin das Wort „men“ zu wiederholen. Reime sind seltener hier als im Schnitt im Gesamtwerk Stevens, dagegen könnte die freie Verwendung von Assonanzen im Lyrischen bereits eine Idee neuerer Musik vorwegnehmen. Die Klangreihe „freed, speech, be, disbelief“, ist ein herausstechendes Beispiel davon. Des Weiteren arbeitet Stevens auch hier mit innerhalb der Zeilen versteckten Anklängen, etwa Hoon-whom, wobei alle stilistischen Mittel sehr vorsichtig eingesetzt sind, das Gedicht den Eindruck eines sich relativ frei durch Bilder entwickelten Gedankens erweckt. Aber: Eben doch nicht so frei, dass es ganze aus der Form geht. Und darin beweist Stevens hier wie in vielen weiteren Werken große Meisterschaft.Was mich, ganz nebenbei, besonders fasziniert, ist, wie Stevens zugleich so viel antiquierter und moderner wirken kann als Zeitgenossen wie etwa der schon genannte Eliot. „Ein jegliches hat seine Zeit“, schreibt der in seinem letzten Gedicht, Four Quartetts, ehe er der Lyrik zugunsten des Dramas komplett den Rücken kehrt. Und Eliot hat seine Zeit zwischen erstem und zweitem Weltkrieg. Welches auch immer seiner größeren Werke man liest, man wird sie als typisch moderne (im Sinner der recht eng abgesteckten Literaturperiode) Gedichte identifizieren. Stevens dagegen, in seiner partiellen Wiederbelebung von der Moderne bereits beerdigt geglaubter Formen, steht mit einem Fuß tief im 19. Jahrhundert, vielleicht noch deutlich weiter zurück. Aber diese lässige Freiheit, mit der er diese Formen gebraucht, dieses totale Desinteresse daran, welche Form von Dichtung der Zeitgeist fordert und das wie nebenbei Stoßen auf eine Dichtung, die dennoch wie oben an nur einem von zahlreichen Beispielen gezeigt, total zeitgemäß ist, das mutet so fortschrittlich an, dass es vom Groß der modernen (nun im weiteren Sinne gerbaucht) Dichtung bis heute nicht eingeholt wurde.Is beautiful

⭐This is the Pulitzer Prize winning collection and Stevens has done some culling and editing. Highly recommended.

⭐Perfect, just what I wanted. Excellent seller

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