I will include some quotes from his letters that I liked, mostly because they were well-written or poetic.
"The trees were full of voices as a bush is full of leaves." [Writing about Central Park in NYC]
Fun fact: He called his wife “Bo-bo”
The house is a huge volume full of the story of her thirty-five years or more within it.” [about his mother]
“We have been here all summer and intend to remain here, as dismal as two grave-diggers spending a rainy night in a vault. Hartford is like that just now. But the sea-shore, etc. in summer turns me really blue.” [from a letter to Harriet Monroe]
2 comments:
The Reader
All night I sat reading a book,
Sat reading as if in a book
Of sombre pages.
It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shrivelled forms
Crouched in the moonlight.
No lamp was burning as I read,
A voice was mumbling, "Everything
Falls back to coldness,
Even the musky muscadines,
The melons, the vermilion pears
Of the leafless garden."
The sombre pages bore no print
Except the trace of burning stars
In the frosty heaven.
This is an absolutely beautiful poem by Stevens. There is a melancholy tone overriding the poem – it is not excruciatingly depressing, rather mellow and matter of fact. Death is inevitable. The last stanza – “the trace of burning stars” – is tremendous.
last looks at the lilacs, by wallace stevens
To what good, in the alleys of the lilacs,
O caliper, do you scratch your buttocks
And tell the divine ingenue, your companion,
That this bloom is the bloom of soap
And this fragrance the fragrance of vegetal?
Do you suppose that she cares a tick,
In this hymeneal air, what it is
That marries her innocence thus,
So that her nakedness is near,
Or that she will pause at scurrilous words?
Poor buffo! Look at the lavender
And look your last and look steadily,
And say how it comes that you see
Nothing but trash and that you no longer feel
Her body quivering in the Floreal
Toward the cool night and its fantastic star,
Prime paramour and belted paragon,
Well-booted, rugged, arrogantly male,
Patron and imager of the gold Don John,
Who will embrace her before summer comes.
Wallace Stevens writes about the degradation of nature. I really like the second stanza, where he compares nature to a woman who un-willfully marries mankind, only to have trash – wrappers and soap – lying on the ground.
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