The task and challenge of the human imagination: "It must reveal the variations in perceiving a single plum; it must attend the circuses of human reverie, wed thought to feeling and, in accomplishing this, give life to all abstraction. It must make rich the poorest man who will but shape his dreams to look about, and measure wealth by all the landscapes to be seen, and measure human dignity by the pleasure music brings to the ear."
Notes on 'The
Comic Spirit': Chapter 1 of Robert Pack's "Wallace Stevens"
I. The
Predominant Quality of Stevens' Verse
A.
Eloquence, typified by:
1.
Extensive vocabulary
2.
Metrical dexterity
3.
Relationship of sense and sound
II. Color and
sound used in a general way to evoke a mood or
provide a
sensual background
A. Color
and sound become part of a larger awareness:
1. The
sensual as a principle or force
2.
Physical life as the setting in which thought and imagination thrive
III. In
Stevens' world, the individual is never as large as his imagination
A. He
fills the world with thought and its accompanying feeling
B. His
mind moves in the direction of theory and the comprehension
of the
general and the abstract
IV. The
imagination does not grow old, nor does the world it perceives
A. The
comic imagination keeps the proper distance from things, even if
they are
the poet's own ideas
1. It
protects the poet from defining the world by his own passions
V. Stevens'
work affirms the immediate
A. Plot
and action are the opposite of time; they assume that time is limited
and can
be used up
1. In
reality, it is the tragic hero who is limited, not time itself
VI. While
action is momentary, thought resembles time in that it has no
ostensible end
A.
Thought and speech, not plot and action are primary to Stevens' poetry
B. All
aspects of speech and meditation are to be found in Stevens' poetry
1. Rhetoric
2. Aside
3. Aphorism
4. Digression
5. Elegance
VII. Stevens
attempts the discovery of the unusual within the ordinary
VIII. Stevens'
poetry often produces the silent laughter of the gracefully
and
profoundly humorous