/lit/ - Literature

Wallace Stevens was 44 when he published his first book of poetry and he's the greatest male American poet

Just had a law degree, which isn't literary. A businessman who wrote poetry.

EXPLAIN WALLACE STEVENS TO ME!!!!! EXPLAIN WALLACE STEVENS TO ME GOD FUCKING DAMMIT OR I'LL BLOW MY BRAINS OUT ALL OVER THIS FUCKING BOARD

>>12962492
It's Wallace Stevens, dude.

Is Wallace Stevens only important because of Harold Bloom?

>>12688206
This pretty much. This board is mostly for LARPing as a Catholic and pretending to be an edgy reader of WHACKY and CRAZY thinks like Deleuze.

Now, because OP is a retard, I am hijacking this thread. What do we think of Wallace Stevens? He is obviously quite a talented wordsmith, but what do we think of his subject matter?

What is the superior language?

This is the ideal male body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

>>12076618

>>11857782
Reminder that Pound and Eliot are traitors who don't count and Dickinson is a woman

>>11138638

>>10724158
>ulysses was great
Poseur begone
>>10724172
The saddest part about this post is how meekly it expresses nothing. Did your fingers withdrawal into the sleeves of your sweater after typing it?
>>10724726
More truth than you intended

I told someone I was messaging on Tinder that I knew what Radishes means in this Wallace Stevens poem. She's expecting my to tell her when we meet IRL. I've been looking everywhere online for a clue but I have no idea.

Please /lit/, save me

#Cy est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et les Unze Mille Vierges
Ursula, in a garden, found
A bed of radishes.
She kneeled upon the ground
And gathered them,
With flowers around,
Blue, gold, pink, and green.

She dressed in red and gold brocade
And in the grass an offering made
Of radishes and flowers.

She said, "My dear,
Upon your altars,
I have placed
The marguerite and coquelicot,
And roses
Frail as April snow;
But here," she said,
"Where none can see,
I make an offering, in the grass,
Of radishes and flowers."
And then she wept
For fear the Lord would not accept.
The good Lord in His garden sought
New leaf and shadowy tinct,
And they were all His thought.
He heard her low accord,
Half prayer and half ditty,
And He felt a subtle quiver,
That was not heavenly love,
Or pity.

This is not writ
In any book.

ITT writers virtually all of whose works are worth reading. Pic related.

I want you to tell me if I'm retarded or not, lit. I have a collection of steven wallace's poems next to my bed, I pick it up every night to read a poem or two. I admit, I don't really understand a single poem in that entire collection. Am I retarded?

Who's the greatest American poet of the 20th century?

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

>He says no to no and yes to yes. He says yes
To no; and in saying yes he says farewell.

How much crack and/or PCP did this Wallace Stevens guy like smoke?

What was his end game? Has any other poet or writer ever came close to such levels of meta-analysis of literature through literature itself?

Who are some writers from the 20th century that were associated with the Modernist movement, but weren't really categorised as Modernists?

I can think of Wallace Stevens, Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald

Will there ever again be a poet as great as Wallace Stevens?

hello boyos

What is /lit/'s view of Wallace Stevens?

This is Wallace Stevens's Anecdote of a Jar:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Here is an analysis of it by some dude named Donald Gutierrez:
Being placed on top of a hill gives the jar an apex of human purpose through nature...It is the design of a created object embodying a human, cultural purpose. Further, the roundness is the symbolic design of purpose placed in nature, which in itself lacks purpose or order. The jar's roundness, exerting a centripetal force on the "slovenly wilderness," endows the wilderness (including the hill) with the order of a center. All the natural disorderliness of the wilderness acquires a purposive spatial character through "centering," and is given a figurative order in the way "rounded" and rounding human purpose shapes significance into the raw matter of earthly phenomena. Accordingly, human circularity, human centralization, civilizes "wilderness," not only the wild, that is, but chaos, nullity, meaninglessness, by providing it structure. This governing force is so powerful that even in its plainest, simplest representations ("grey and bare") the jar compels a "surrounding."

"Anecdote of a Jar" is a metaphor about the magnetic power of mind and art to order a void (and the void). Stress is laid upon its non-naturalness (11.10-12) to accentuate the crucial power of artistic and thus human purpose. Art (mind) governs its antithesis, nature—"It took dominion everywhere," even, indeed, especially, in a non-civilized, non-human place.

The shaper here is himself "round"; he rounds significances through symbolic artifacts which express his desire to dominate all that is senseless or shapeless or wild by compelling it into pattern, thus transferring from God to art and man the force of the ancient gnosis that "God is a Circle, whose Circumference is nowhere and whose Centre is everywhere."

What I want to know is how the fuck are people getting all this shit from that poem? I will admit that I'm new in regards to reading poetry, and I know Wallace's poems are difficult, but this kind of analysis is so far beyond me as to look like it was made up.

How does one "read" poetry?