Talk:Wallace Stevens/Archive 2

Atheism, continued

That Stevens was an atheist is not a controversial statement. But he typically didn't argue for the non-existence of god. He saw the "Death of God" as a foregone conclusion and worked this assumption into almost every poem he wrote. Call him an unbeliever if the term atheist doesn't feel right. But he was an atheist and his atheism was inseparable from his poetry. Without the presumption of atheism, almost none of his poetry could have been written. [Note: I am a bit lazy in looking up the proper citation style ]

Quotes

In Adagia, [Stevens’s aphorisms], he goes to far as to say that poetry is ‘life’s redemption’ after belief in God is no longer possible.” (Lives of the Poets, Michael Schmidt, 705)

“. . . the scope of Stevens’s mind … is roughly coextensive with that of the modern mind and sensibility; the range of his reflections, after the death of god, still covers most of what we think of as possible in our condition, a condition Stevens repeatedly calls ‘poverty’. (Wallace Stevens, Frank Kermode, xviii)

This vanishing of the gods, leaving a barren man in a barren land, is the basis of all Stevens’ thought and poetry. His version of the death of the gods coincides with a radical transformation in the way man sees the world.

So, in ‘Sunday Morning,’ the lady’s experience of the dissolution of the gods leaves her living in a world of exquisite particulars, the physical realities of the new world …. This physical world, an endless round of birth, death and the seasons, is more lasting than any interpretation of it. Religions, myths, philosophies, and cultures are all fictions and pass away, but ‘April’s green endures’. (Poets of Reality, J. Hillis Miller, 219-222)

In the Phaedrus, Plato speaks of the soul in a figure. [Here Stevens quotes Plato. Plato talks about a charioteer driving winged horses across the sky . . .] We recognize what Coleridge called Plato’s dear, gorgeous nonsense …. “We suddenly remember that the soul no longer exists and we droop in our flight …. A charioteer driving his chariot across the whole heaven was for Plato precisely what he is for us. He was unreal for Plato as he is for us. Plato, however, could yield himself, was free to yield himself, to this gorgeous nonsense. We cannot yield ourselves. We are not free to yield ourselves.“ (The Necessary Angel, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words”, Wallace Stevens, 3-4)

Citations from Poems

[Note: CP = Collected Poems]

Nuances on a Theme by Williams (CP 18)

[Stevens is speaking of a distant star whose light is being overwhelmed by the morning sun]

Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze,
that reflects neither my face nor any inner part
of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.

Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses
you in its own light.
Be not chimera of morning,
Half-man, half-star.
Be not an intelligence,
Like a widow’s bird
or an old horse.

Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb (CP 56)

[The entire poem reflects an atheistic point of view]

Disillusionment of Ten O’clock (CP 66)

[The entire poem reflects an atheistic point of view]

Notice, the speaker is not feeling disillusioned AT 10:00, (two hours to midnight), he is making an argument that systematically disillusions 10:00 (ridding the hour of its illusions). The argument is that our description of metaphysical things pales in its imagination when compared to even the most deranged imagining of reality (an old sailor drunk and asleep dreaming of tigers).

Sunday Morning (CP 66-70)

[The entire poem reflects an atheistic point of view]

The Death of a Soldier (CP 97)

[When a soldier dies ...]
He does not become a three-days personage,
Imposing his separation,
Calling for pomp.

Death is absolute and without memorial,
As in a season of autumn,
When the wind stops…

[A dead soldier does not act like Jesus, requiring us to celebrate his sacrifice, he just dies.]

Anatomy of a Monotony (CP 107-108)

[The entire poem reflects an atheistic point of view]

Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu (CP 127-128)

In a world without heaven to follow, the stops
Would be endings, more poignant than partings, profounder,
And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,
Just to be there and to behold.
...
Just to be there, just to be beheld,
That would be bidding farewell, be bidding farewell.
...
What is there here but the weather, what spirit
Have I except it comes from the sun?

Botonist on Alp (No. 2) (CP 135)

[The entire poem reflects an atheistic point of view]

The Men That Are Falling (CP 187,188)

God and all angels, this was his desire,
Whose head lies blurring here, for this he died.
...
This death was his belief though death is a stone.
This man loved earth, not heaven, enough to die.

The Sense of the Sleight-Of-Hand Man

[The entire poem reflects an atheistic point of view]

Esthetique Du Mal (CP 313-326)

The fault lies with an over-human god,
Who by sympathy has made himself a man
And is not to be distinguished, when we cry

Because we suffer, our oldest parent, peer
Of the populace of the heart, the reddest lord,
Who has gone before us in experience.

If only he would not pity us so much,
Weaken our fate, relieve us of woe both great
And small, a constant fellow in destiny,

A too, too human god, self-pity’s kin
And uncourageous genesis . . . It seems
As if the health of the world might be enough.
...
How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality…

Flyer’s Fall (CP 336)

This man escaped the dirty fates,
Knowing that he died nobly, as he died.

Darkness, nothingness of human after-death,
Receive and keep him in the deepnesses of space –

Profundum, physical thunder, dimension in which
We believe without belief, beyond belief.

Burghers of Petty Death (CP 362)

These two by the stone wall
Are a slight part of death.
The grass is still green.

But there is a total death,
A devastation, a death of great height
And depth, covering all surfaces,
Filling the mind.

These are the small townsmen of death,
a man and a woman, like two leaves
That keep clinging to a tree,
Before winter freezes and grows black –

Of great height and depth
Without any feeling, an imperium of quiet
In which a wasted figure, with an instrument
Propounds blank final music.

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (CP 380-381)

You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.

Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for the mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.

How clean the sun when seen in its idea
Washing in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven
That has expelled us and our images . . .
...
The death of one god is the death of all.

Lebensweisheitspielerei (CP 504-505)

Little by little, the poverty
of autumnal space becomes
A look, a few words spoken.

Each person completely touches us
With what he is and as he is,
In the stale grandeur of annihilation.

[note: I recognize that in this case the image of death is a complex of symbolic meaning and not simply death alone.]

The Rock (CP 525)

It is an illusion that we were ever alive,
Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves
By our own motions in a freedom of air.

... The houses still stand,
Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.

Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain.
The lives these lived in the mind are at an end.
They never were . . . .

Homanid 05:55, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

As an atheist, Stevens would naturally be attracted to Schopenhauer's philosophy, which he was. The notion of a world that is essentially an unknowing, urging force may have been an influence on some of his poems.66.82.9.80 22:23, 5 August 2006 (UTC)Lestrade

Why is this cluttered mess present on a discussion page? It is completely inappropriate for a page in what alleges to be connected to an encyclopedia article. This is also true of the entire discussion page, but it is most blatantly true here. The amazing excess of quotations, irrelevant arguments, "novel" interpretations, and long-winded babbling are all a complete embarrassment, and vastly degrade the integrity and communicative ability of the page.

The pith of the article should be decided, included in the article, and then all of this garbage should be cleared so that only the most pressing and active discussions remain. The purpose of this page should be to display the areas where work still needs to be done, not to include an unreadable and uninformative addendum. (Fourthandfifth (talk) 06:14, 2 September 2011 (UTC))

True! And what a wonderful opportunity for you to learn how to archive a talk page! If you're not interested, I'll take care of it sometime. --Fullobeans (talk) 21:10, 2 September 2011 (UTC)

Original Research

I really hate to bring this up, because I genuinely like the page as it is right now, and I more or less agree with its explications and broad themes. But I worry that a lot of the page consists of original research. The page seems to be consistent with a good deal of criticism I've read on Stevens; can we make an effort to include more citations from criticism, so that we are quoting external sources when asserting things such as (for example) "Stevens concludes that god is a human creation, but that feeling of rightness which for so long a time existed with the idea of god may be accessed again"?

The above statement is arguably true, but it should not be Wikipedia that asserts it to be so. (On the other hand, I wouldn't want the page to start to look like a term paper.) --thither 05:06, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree that we should add citations where possible. I wouldn't worry about the "term-paper" look. What is important is that we put the correct citation data in where necessary. As an example to consider, the article on Vincent van Gogh has a large number of citations, but this doesn't significantly interfere with the readability or the look of the article, and no doubt later versions of the Wikipedia software will provide better ways to display and access the copious reference information. Stumps 10:55, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it definitely needs references. The main editors on this seem to have been Halcatalyst and Homanid. A good place to start would be to simply ask them for their sources.--Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 17:31, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Thither - if the article is consistent with Stevens criticism, then it's not OR. OR would be things that are not consistent with Stevens criticism. Just because something doesn't have citations doesn't make it OR. It just means that it doesn't have citations. Something which is OR is something which couldn't have citations, at least not legitimate ones. It sounds like this article just needs to have citations added. That's not the same thing as an OR problem. john k 03:54, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree that the space given to unsupported opinion should be minimized or avoided. Although I'm guilty of it myself :-D homanid — Preceding undated comment added 00:22, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Reality or Unreality

A small point (I'm mostly onside with the article). I'd find the following passage more helpful if "unreal" were replaced by "real" or "real in Stevens' favored sense".

As J. H. Miller summarizes Stevens's position, :"Though this dissolving of the self is in one way the end of everything, in another way it is the happy liberation. There are only two entities left now that the gods are dead: man and nature, subject and object. Nature is the physical world, visibile, audible, tangible, present to all the senses, and man is consciousness, the nothing which receives nature and transforms it into something unreal..."

The article has already told us that "[r]eality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world." This suggests that the self's transformative work issues in reality, not unreality, and that reality is not to be identified with the world or nature (just as an urn is not to be identified with the clay from which it's shaped). The Waldorf isn't Guatemala, but it's not simply unreality. :-) Rats 14:18, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

Hi Rats. The word "unreality" is part of a quote and makes sense in its own way. Miller used unreality to refer to Stevens's idea that people are incapable of truly seeing reality. For Stevens, it's all shades of gray. The best we can do is approach whiteness (reality). Through our efforts to create explanations of the world, we transform reality into something unreal -- i.e. we color the whiteness with at least a little bit of gray. For this reason, Stevens believes that the world is a constant flux, where imaginings created by others and in another time and place tend to grow stale and require us to create something new and more satisfying. A good example of this type of flux would be the how our understanding of the universe has changed over time: From gods who moved as lights in the sky; to a series of spheres with holes in them to let in the light of the firmament; to bodies moving in Ptolemaic epicycles; to kepler's oval's; to Newtonian physics; to Einsteinian physics. I left a bunch of stuff out, but I think it shows the general idea. Even our most successful imaginings (Newtonian physics) may ultimately fail to be satisifactory for future generations.

Reality shapes the world of the viewer (subjective reality), but leaves objective reality untouched and unrealized - and therefore, unreal. Homanid — Preceding undated comment added 22:06, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Citations

I added as many citations as I could find from my private Stevens collection. The only thing I couldn't locate in writing was Hart Crane's letter (at the end), but I'm sure if someone has access to his collected letters, it would be easy to find.NielsenGW 20:35, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Title Casing

Why is title casing not used? I've noticed that wiki seems to generally be against it, but the lack here is particularly jarring. 72.152.48.121 17:25, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

help

how about telling us where he was born, where he grew up, what his parents did etc. thats how a traditional encylopedia entry starts and none of that is here. this article needs cleaned up very badly. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.176.15.40 (talk) 03:35, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Encyclopedia article or term paper?

I'm concerned that most of the section called "Poetry" is composed of term-paper style analysis, not encyclopedic information. It "feels" as though it has been cut and pasted from an undergraduate paper on Stevens' poetry. The reader needs to do a lot of work to understand what claims the author is making about Stevens in these excerpts--and isn't making claims inappropriate here? I think almost the entire section should be cut, but I don't know if that's acceptable editing. Thoughts? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.206.111.162 (talk) 23:44, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

This is Wikipedia: if you can improve it, you are invited to do so. If not, what's the point of complaining? Who are you complaining TO, after all? anyone and everyone with an internet connection? --Francesco Franco aka Lacatosias 09:32, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Wow--that's an unfriendly response. I wasn't complaining, I was holding back from making a major change to an article because I'm new to Wikipedia and didn't want to overstep my boundaries. I thought this section was called "Discussion" because it was a place for, um, discussion...so that's who I was "complaining" to. Chill, man. 9 May 2007 —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 67.180.235.11 (talk) 05:10, 10 May 2007 (UTC).

On a more friendly note, wikipedia encourages you to be bold when editing, so go ahead and do it if you think it will improve the article; if people disagree they can always revert or complain about your edits. I agree that, though the article has improved with respect to sourcing, it still seems like a great deal of original research. I think instead of asserting things about Stevens's poetry, it should maybe summarize some established critical positions on him.--thither 06:07, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Better encyclopedias do include substantive discussion of the ideas of major authors. I think this section is very appropriate. (Always room for improvement of course!) Falstaf (talk) 17:28, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

"Most famous poem" status

On what basis given to The Emperor of Ice Cream? What evidence that it's more famous than XVIII Ways of Looking at a Blackbird or "Sunday Morning," "Anecdote of the Jar," "Idea of Order at Key West" etc?

NOTE: this should be Thirteen Ways, not Eighteen. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.118.148.102 (talk) 19:53, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Moreover, why make this claim under the spotlight of the intro paragraph where it is one of only three presumably key sentences?Cyrusc (talk) 16:47, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Is "Tattoo" one of Stevens's "best-known" poems? It's a fine poem, but it is not frequently anthologized? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.189.76.18 (talk) 20:40, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

Death-bed conversion

The current NYT has a review of the new selected poems book. In it, the reviewer makes the point that there is no official record of WS's conversion though, the reviewer states, Church protocol calls for conversions to be recorded. All this seems counter to the tone of the Wik article as it now reads.Kdammers (talk) 02:34, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

For those wondering what it was:

"Against his father’s wishes, he married Elsie Kachel, a beautiful but poorly educated girl of a class lower than his own. Nobody from his family attended the wedding, and Stevens never again visited or spoke to his parents during his father’s lifetime. The unfortunate marriage eventually failed, and in a bitter way. Stevens’s only child, Holly, told me that her mother was mentally ill, that she was suspicious of neighbors, that she would not allow other children into the house to play, and that when Stevens was rehospitalized for 10 days before his death from cancer, his wife never once went to the hospital (although Holly was there every day). Holly scoffed at the tale of Stevens’s reputed baptism and “conversion” related many years later by the hospital chaplain; in her daily attendance, she saw no sign of it and heard nothing of it. (There is no written record of that “baptism,” although all Roman Catholic priests are required to record the baptisms they perform.)"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/books/review/Vendler-t.html --Gwern (contribs) 10:18 22 August 2009 (GMT)

Stevens' politics

I've improved the refs regarding Stevens' politics, but not without a twinge of conscience, because I think the current placement of the section accords the topic undue prominence. The facts are not in dispute -- everybody knows this -- but when I draw up a mental list of things to know about Stevens ranked by their unimportance, his politics sit near the top of the list, hovering somewhere near his shoe size. Where should this go? -- Rrburke (talk) 00:37, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Atheism, part 3

"Sunday Morning" has clear atheistic and hedonistic themes and is great starting point for an understanding of Stevens' early religious views(as portrayed in his poetry, or by his persona): it denies the existence of God, of fate, of Heaven, and of a more-than-natural Jesus, urging its listeners to create--like the early Christians created the Bible, or Wallace Stevens himself created his atheistic/hedonistic philosophy-- by acts of imagination a hedonistic religion/philosophy that celebrates people and place, which is "all of heaven that [we] will know". And what would you know?

It's just one of many poems in Harmonium to contain such themes, which don't change too much as you go through Stevens' catalog (though he begins to focus more on the imagination proper, and less on his issues with old edifices of imagination, like Christianity).

Anyone who argues against the presence of atheism in Stevens' work, or even doubts its presence, doesn't know or doesn't understand Stevens' work. Next. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.110.82.179 (talk) 23:39, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

unless you hate poetry, don't cite it as support for something else-- and in that case, why not stick to the Op-Ed page? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.68.128.91 (talk) 20:54, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

In deciding whether to call Stevens an atheist, we ought to take into account his own statement in a letter to Sister Bernetta Quinn, Dec. 21, 1951: "I am not an atheist although I do not believe to-day in the same God in whom I believed when I was a boy" (Letters of Wallace Stevens, p. 735).71.235.44.66 (talk) 23:23, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

RE claims regarding conversion to Roman Catholicism

The following comment by Newsalem may have been posted by mistake in the main article, rather than here: — Preceding unsigned comment added by MistyMorn (talk • contribs) 20:31, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Yet, there is support for Stevens's conversion. See notes #14 and #15 in the Wikipedia entry for "Deathbed conversions." In Note 15, in a reply to a letter to him from Helen Vendler on the subject, Fr. Chicetto replies (in part, dated 9/2/09): "Dear Helen Vendler, I didn't expect you to agree with everything I put down in my letter to you. It is disturbing, however, when you ignore the testimony of Dr. Edward Sennett (in charge of the Radiology Dept. at St. Francis Hospital when Stevens was admitted both times [1955]) and the Sisters with whom I talked in 1977 (and later) who believed Fr. Hanley's account. They never spoke of any kind of forgetfulness or memory loss on Fr. Hanley's part, whether noble (when one intentionally does not remember injuries, mischief, etc.) or unmeant (when one unintentionally cannot remember things owing to trauma, confusion or some other mental impairment). What provoked me NOT to visit Fr. Hanley in 1977 was their testimony that his account in 1955 was credible and that they believed Stevens was baptized. The Sisters had no reason to doubt Hanley's word, one of whom worked with him and knew him quite well. You seem to want to ignore that. Do you really believe they were ALL taken in by Fr. Hanley's 'forgetfulness,' by his 'mental impairment,' in 1977, when he was alive, retired, and in touch with them? (He lived only a half hour away from them!) Dr. Sennett was too sharp a person and knew the Sisters too well to believe they were being deluded and misled owing to Fr. Hanley's 'memory loss.' Also, in your response, you ignore the fact that a number of priests in the past refrained from recording (in nearby parishes and hospitals) the baptisms of certain dying people. I myself, for example, remember baptizing two people and leaving their baptisms unrecorded on two different occasions. That is, I baptized two people (unconditionally and absolutely), gave them Communion, and didn't record their baptisms in a nearby parish or at the hospital – for many reasons, not the least being that the dying person wanted no Catholic funeral and preferred that his/her 'reception' remain private (i.e., between himself/herself and God). I mentioned this in my first letter. Such private baptisms did occur in New England and elsewhere! (Today, of course, federal law and new legislation requires that some sort of record of a person's baptism be kept in the hospital as part of the deceased person's medical history. But that was not always the case in the past. And it is anyone's guess as to whether priests abide by those rules today; they pick and chose so freely.) Finally, to assume that because 'nothing in his [Stevens'] poetry or prose suggests any wish to be a member of any church' he therefore could never have requested a private baptism flies in the face of so many 'hour of death' accounts of the dying, many of whose private testimonies, disclosures, groundless terrors contradict the reckonings and calculations erected or founded on their earlier lives (and, in this case, the person's writings). The dying often believe for themselves; not for another person or for the sake of some book they wrote. Any person who has witnessed the dying also knows that they 'say' and disclose their sentiments (in words and gestures) better than the witnesses or those around them can, foolish cliches and all. In conclusion, I don't think this response to your letter will dissuade you from holding your own belief that Fr. Hanley was forgetful, etc. Indeed, reasoning further against your opinion in this matter would be like fighting against a shadow – all-consuming, exhausting without affecting the shadow...." User:Newsalem