Vox Populi
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Wallace Stevens: A Disillusionment at Ten O’Clock
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches Tigers
In red weather.
~~~~
Public Domain. First published in Harmonium (1923)
Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.
From the first, critics and fellow poets praised Stevens. Hart Crane wrote to a friend in 1919, after reading some of the poems that would make up Harmonium, “There is a man whose work makes most of the rest of us quail.” The Poetry Foundation states that “by the early 1950s Stevens was regarded as one of America’s greatest contemporary poets, an artist whose precise abstractions exerted substantial influence on other writers.” Some critics, like Randall Jarrell and Yvor Winters, praised Stevens’s early work but were critical of his more abstract and philosophical later poems.
For an extended biography of Stevens, click here.
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A marvelous playful poem. The playfulness of the language contradicts or rather mitigates the disillusionment. The speaker trapped in a white-nightgown world of repression and respectability yet able to summon up wild language.
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Stravinsky, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost. WB Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and other renowned artists were all in their prime about the same time. It was a time when much difference among creative work flowered. The meanings of beauty, style, technique, etc. were all in creative flux along with philosophical understanding and aesthetics. Is it surprising that any given reader, listener, or gazer of today would treasure the work of all those geniuses equally? And as Laure-Anne Bosselaar explains so vividly, we each bring our own experiences, so wide and different, to their work, as we wrestle with these giants.
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Yes, and over time we begin to see them more clearly. For example, H.D. has become the poet I value most among that generation.
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Thanks for this amazing poem. Maybe we all need to discard our white nightgowns and play, get into wild colors, and know that with imagination our lives can be enriched.
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Yes!
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I am a fan. It took me some time. So many of his great lines are constantly with me. Death is the Mother of Beauty.
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I love his poems as well, Donna. But he is a poet of the mind, not the heart. He is a Modernist, not a Romantic.
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Definitely a poet of the mind. There are many rooms in the house of poetry.
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Exactly, Donna. Thank you.
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Yeah….I dunno. I’m still in a “miffy,” baffled, grumpy mood when I read Stevens. In the nunnery where I grew up, the nuns used to push children away by pressing their palm to our foreheads and say “Now try to touch me, just try!” And we’d be flailing ridiculously. For some probably absurd reason, that’s what I feel Stevens poems do to me! I do return to him from time to time, to see if he’ll let me in. But nope. Not until now. Fine with me, frankly. My friends Levis, & Pegeen Kelly, & Merwin, Rilke, & Louis Aragon, & StVincent Millay, & my extraordinarily talented community of poets still alive keep me in awe, delighted, entertained, inspired & thankful!
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It’s okay, Laure-Anne. We are all allowed our preferences.
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Love WS. (Though he is underestimating some white night-gowns …)
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Oh, only Wallace Stevens can do this. Yay!
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Unlike Sean in his comment, I spent some intense reading time with Stevens decades ago. Then nothing of him for years. There’s dust it’s time to blow off my collection of his in its fading blue cover. Opening his collected poetry at random can lead to bewilderment. I need a crafty guide.
But a poem with his whimsy mixed into the jars of precise colors he writes with, can be most thoughtful. My marvel with Stevens is how he could spend his working hours in the world of white-collar business, with its left-brain-centric language, agendas, insurance forms to parse, etc. and then trudge home and bemuse his way into language miracles, mixing together metaphor with reason but often creating something between the far ends of frippery or Blake’s warning of dead logic.
And Sean, if you plan to shoot an elephant in your pajamas, better show the beast where they are so it can try them on first. It might not be a good fit.
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🤣😂
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One of my favorite poems to start a class with. We see all that he names as not there! It incites the imagination and illustrates it. I’ve loved Steven’s for years. Might be time to revisit him.
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Stevens not Steven’s!
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My phone often adds an apostrophe. It added one incorrectly on a comment I made here recently.
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Robots rule the world.
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Thanks, Mary. Me too.
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Its a perfect “rearrange your poetry mind” poem for the New Year. Miles said to his band: “Don’t you guys ever get tired of sounding like yourselves?” Harmonium is the only Stevens volume I own, and only came into my life a few years ago, as somehow I’d never made that stop on the poetry express. I understand it only a little but I treasure it among my most favorite indispensable volumes. You’ve reminded me to open it again. He’s not going away is he?
Dawn or Night I’m ready for those delightful or dreaded red weather tigers, and next thing I do, I plan to shoot an elephant in my pajamas.
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Stevens was a deeply flawed man, as we learn from his letters, but he wrote some of the most original and influential poems of the 20th century.
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