Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Week 12 | April 16 • The Plain Sense of Things 428; Vacancy in the Park 434; The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain 435; Two Illustrations That the World is What You Make of It 435; Prologues to What is Possible 437; Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly 439; The World as Meditation 441 • Major Poem: An Ordinary Evening in New Haven 399 • Voices and Visions Film: Robert Lowell • Philosopher of the Week: Ludwig Wittgenstein • Composer of the Week: George Gershwin • Painter of the Week:Joan Miro Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Voices and Visions Film: Robert Lowell (1917-1977) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Philosopher of the Week: Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death. . . . Ludwig Wittgenstein, TractatusLogicusPhilosophicus Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Can only those hope who can talk? Ludwig Wittgenstein Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized. Ludwig Wittgenstein, TractatusLogicusPhilosophicus Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limit. Ludwig Wittgenstein, TractatusLogicusPhilosophicus Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is. Ludwig Wittgenstein, TractatusLogicusPhilosophicus Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, a landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without cholera and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman. Ludwig Wittgenstein Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. (Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?) Ludwig Wittgenstein, TractatusLogicusPhilosophicus Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Imagine people who could only think aloud. (As there are people who can only read aloud.) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

"This queer thing, thought”—but it does not strike us as queer when are thinking. Thought does not strike us as mysterious while we are thinking, but only when we say, as it were retrospectively: "How was that possible? How was it possible for thought to deal with the very object itself?" We feel as if by means of it we had caught reality in our net. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be unutterably contained in what has been uttered! Ludwig Wittgenstein Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Composer of the Week: George Gershwin (1898-1937) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

George Gershwin (1898-1937) is one of the legendary figures of the century, gifted with phenomenal musical imagination and creative energy. An early success as a popular composer, Gershwin remained a true artist who refused to be satisfied with acclaim and insisted on striving toward an unprecedented unity of commercial and classical genres. He died in the course of that effort. Of all those who have tried to achieve such a unity, only he may had the talent to achieve it. Gershwin was born in New York to Russian-Jewish parents and studied piano in childhood. Gravitating to the songwriting neighborhood Tin Pan Alley, he began as a plugger of other people’s songs but by 1919 had written his first musical comedy La La Lucille, containing his first hit song, “Swanee." He went on to write hit show after show tor the rest of his life, usually with his brother Ira. Gershwin's list of popular standards is the most impressive of the century, all his songs showing an instinctive melodic genius backed up by equally effective rhythms and harmonies. A very short list includes "Oh Lady Be Good," “Fascinatin' Rhythm," "They Can't Take That Away from Me," and "The Man I Love." Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens George Gershwin (1898-1937)

Meanwhile, amidst the glittering showbiz life, the steady output of songs and shows, the money and women, Gershwin never let go of his early interest in the other side of music. That ﬁnally resolved into the idea of joining popular and classical music, or as it was put in those days, "making a lady out of jazz." The ﬁrst of those efforts was Rhapsody in Blue, premiered in New York in 1924. Though it was scooped by earlier jazz-inspired concert works of Milhaud and Stravinsky, Gershwin’s Rhapsody has been by far the most famous. Responding to criticisms that the form of the Rhapsody wandered and that he didn't orchestrate it himself, Gershwin got a book on concerto form and tried his hand at one, producing his Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra in 1925. In that and later works he proved an imaginative handler of the orchestra. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens George Gershwin (1898-1937)

In his pieces for the conceit hall Gershwin would remain a blend of naive and sophisticated, constantly trying to catch up on his technical studies amidst nonstop production in every direction. On one hand, he wrote his concerto more or less from a how-to book; on the other hand, he eagerly absorbed the work of Stravinsky, Berg, Schoenberg, and Les Six. The latter were the main models for his half-French, half-jazzy American in Paris of 1928. Legend says he asked both Ravel and Stravinsky for lessons. Ravel declined, saying he did not want to sully Gershwin's instinctive gifts; but Stravinsky, learning what Gershwin's income was, responded by asking Gershwin for lessons. (Stravinsky denied the story.) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens George Gershwin (1898-1937)

While Gershwin's intuitive genius remained his foundation, his technical skill and confidence increased by leaps and bounds. Finally he decided to attempt the first jazz-oriented folk opera. The result, Porgy and Bess (1935), is based on a story by Charleston writer DuBose Heyward about poor blacks on Charleston's Catfish Row. From the beginning, music critics picked at the formal and stylistic problems of the opera, black musicians criticized its co-opting of their tradition (Duke Ellington deplored “lampblack Negroisms”), and audiences didn't quite know what to make of it. Yet despite everything, Porgy and Bess has been revived again and again, seemingly with greater success every time. Certainly one of the reasons is the ubiquitousness of its “arias"—Broadway-style songs such as "Summertime," “It Ain't Necessarily So." and "I Got Plenty O' Nothin'." Like many Romantic composers, Gershwin had a better gift for melody than he did for large-scale form, but that gift has made his music immortal. When he was cut down at thirty eight by a brain tumor, his friend and admirer Arnold Schoenberg wrote, "Music to him was the air he breathed, the food which nourished him, the drink that refreshed him. Music was what made him feel, and music was the feeling he expressed. Directness of the kind is given only to great men, and there is no doubt that he was a great composer." Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens George Gershwin (1898-1937)

Painter of the Week:Joan Miro (1893-1983) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

In conception and execution, surrealism was primarily a bourgeois art-form. Its intention was to prise open the closed mind and shuttered perception of ‘everyman’ (identiﬁed, for this purpose, as a furled-umbrella Belgian clerk) and to show ordinary people the wonders lurking in their own Ids. Those wonders were, more often than not, utilitarian objects (pipes, fob-watches, ladders, tailor’s dummies) set in the deserts, parks and marble piazzas of the imagination: a travel-brochure dream of freedom. The paradox is that because this art constantly refers to the objects which are (in the surrealists’ minds at least) the prison-bars of the everyday, it is less a parable of freedom than a reminder of imprisonment: surrealist paintings are more often disorienting than comforting, gloomy rather than zestful, sterile rather than creative. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Joan Miro (1893-1983)

Some of Miro’s work, it is true, is cut to this uncomfortable pattern. Still Life with Old Shoe, for example (I937; 115X80; MMA, NY), depicts ordinary objects (a bottle, a fork stuck in a fruit, a loaf whose cut end reveals a skull, an old shoe) with all the wished-for plasticity and ooze of Dali. It tells us nothing at all (though it was claimed in the 1930s to be an anti-fascist tract); its effect is clever and depressing. But in general, and although he claimed to be ‘a tragic pessimist at heart’, his paintings forsake mundane ugliness for a gay, fastidious fantasy nearer to Kandinsky and Klee than to doctrinaire surrealism. The painting which announced this style, a masterpiece, was The Harlequin ’s Carnival (I925; 66; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo). This shows a large well-lit room with no furniture but a table and a ladder (equipped, as most Miro ladders are, with an enormous ear). The room is filled with bizarre features and objects in the middle of a party. Each of them seems to metamorphose as we look at it: hour-glasses smile and dance, butterflies turn into dragons and starfish glow like stars. The only person not having fun is a Chirico-like mannequin, with a cigar in one hand and a clay pipe his mouth; he is standing next to a jack-in-the-box which is actually a dragon-fly. The colours are the bright blues, yellows and warm browns of a child’s paint-box. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Joan Miro (1893-1983)

Miro painted scores of pictures of this kind. Whatever the creatures are—insect-life from a Douanier Rousseau jungle, algae and hydrae from a botanist’s microscope or twittering visitors from outer space—they are both delightful and comforting, a painted equivalent to the ‘insect-music’ of Bartok or Martino. Like Klee, Miro is more concerned with pattern and colour than with ‘meaning’; he lets his fantasy lead each picture where it will, and then gives the finished result a teasing title. Dutch Interior II, for example (1928; 91 X72; Coll. Peggy Guggenheim, Venice), ostensibly a transformation of Jan Steen’s painting The Cat’s Dancing-Lesson, in fact is neither Dutch nor set in an interior – though it does include a guitar and a dancing cat. The three extraordinary creatures (bull? beetle? fish?) of Nursery Decoration (1938; 315x79; Weil Coll., St Louis, Missouri) are really ballooning abstract shapes in black and orange on a blue background, given creatureness by the addition of hypnotic Miro eyes and open mouths - and most of Miro’s paintings can be ‘read’ this way. Some of his later works are ‘pure’ abstracts, and for all their extreme simplicity, they shed none of the riot of his figurative art. Yellow-Orange (Mural Painting 1), for example(1962; 3SOX266; Galerie Maeght, Paris), is no more than a huge orange rectangle with (on the right) three black plant-like tendrils and (on the left) two small black circles - and yet you feel that something innocent and wide-eyed is hidden in the picture watching you. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Joan Miro (1893-1983)

If surrealism’s purpose is to refashion, rather than merely to subvert, bourgeois reality, then Miro is a true surrealist. His fantasy includes delight and charm as well as menace; his absorbed or watchful ﬁgures more often dance than ﬁght; his living balloons and spirals, liveried in primary colours, intrigue the mind and entrance the eye. It is not child’s art - too sophisticated and sensuous - but it is childlike for openness and charm. Miro is that rare 20th-century being someone who has listened to Freud and smiled. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Joan Miro (1893-1983)

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Miro: Prades, the Village

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Miro: The Farm

Miro: Carnival of Harlequin Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Miro: Catalan Landscape Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Miro: Dog Barking at Moon

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Miro: Tilled Field

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Miro: Dutch Interior I

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Miro: Horse, Pipe, Red Flower

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Miro: Nocturne

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Miro: Personage Throwing a Stone at a Bird

The Plain Sense of Things (428) After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause. The great structure has become a minor house. No turban walks across the lessened floors. The greenhouse never so badly needed paint. The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition In a repetitiousness of men and flies. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

The Plain Sense of Things Yet the absence of the imagination had Itself to be imagined. The great pond, The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves, Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see, The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, Required, as a necessity requires. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Vacancy in the Park (434) Someone has walked across the snow, Someone looking for he knows not what. It is like a boat that has pulled away From a shore at night and disappeared. It is like a guitar left on a table By a woman, who has forgotten it. It is like the feeling of a man Come back to see a certain house. The four winds blow through the rustic arbor, Under its mattresses of vines. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain (435) There it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in his own direction, How he had recomposed the pines, Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds, For the outlook that would be right, Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain The exact rock where his inexactness Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged, Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea, Recognize his unique and solitary home. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Two Illustrations that the World Is What You Make Of It (435) I The Constant Disquisition of the Wind The sky seemed so small that winter day, A dirty light on a lifeless world, Contracted like a withered stick. It was not the shadow of cloud and cold, But in a sense of the distance of the sun— The shadow of a sense of his own, A knowledge that the actual day Was so much less. Only the wind Seemed large and loud and high and strong. And as he thought within the thought Of the wind, not knowing that that thought Was not his thought, nor anyone’s, Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Two Illustrations that the World Is What You Make Of It The appropriate image of himself, So formed, became himself and he breathed The breath of another nature as his own, But only its momentary breath, Outside of and beyond the dirty light, That never could be animal, A nature still without a shape, Except his own—perhaps, his own In a Sunday’s violent idleness. II The World is Larger in Summer He left half a shoulder and half a head To recognize him in after time. These marbles lay weathering in the grass When the summer was over, when the change Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Two Illustrations that the World Is What You Make Of It Of summer and of the sun, the life Of summer and the sun, were gone. He had said that everything possessed The power to transform itself, or else, And what meant more, to be transformed. He discovered the colors of the moon In a single spruce, when, suddenly, The tree stood dazzling in the air And blue broke on him from the sun, A bullioned blue, a blue abulge, Like daylight, with time's bellishings. And sensuous summer stood full-height. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Two Illustrations that the World Is What You Make Of It The master of the spruce, himself, Became transformed. But his mastery Left only the fragments found in the grass, From his project, as finally magnified. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Prologues to What is Possible (437) I There was an ease of mind that was like being alone in a boat at sea, A boat carried forward by waves resembling the bright backs of rowers, Gripping their oars, as if they were sure of the way to their destination, Bending over and pulling themselves erect on the wooden handles, Wet with water and sparkling in the one-ness of their motion. The boat was built of stones that had lost their weight and being no longer heavy Had left in them only a brilliance, of unaccustomed origin, So that he that stood up in the boat leaning and looking before him Did not pass like someone voyaging out of and beyond the familiar. He belonged to the far-foreign departure of his vessel and was part of it, Part of the speculum of fire on its prow, its symbol, whatever it was, Part of the glass-like sides on which it glided over the salt-stained water, As he traveled alone, like a man lured on by a syllable without any meaning, A syllable of which he felt, with an appointed sureness, That it contained the meaning into which he wanted to enter, A meaning which, as he entered it, would shatter the boat and leave the oarsmen quiet As at a point of central arrival, an instant moment, much or little, Removed from any shore, from any man or woman, and needing none. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Prologues to What is Possible II The metaphor stirred his fear. The object with which he was compared Was beyond his recognizing. By this he knew that likeness of him extended Only a little way, and not beyond, unless between himself And things beyond resemblance there was this and that intended to be recognized, The this and that in the enclosures of hypotheses On which men speculated in summer when they were half asleep. What self, for example, did he contain that had not yet been loosed, Snarling in him for discovery as his attentions spread, As if all his hereditary lights were suddenly increased By an access of color, a new and unobserved, slight dithering, The smallest lamp, which added its puissant flick, to which he gave A name and privilege over the ordinary of his commonplace— A flick which added to what was real and its vocabulary, The way some first thing coming into Northern trees Adds to them the whole vocabulary of the South, The way the earliest single light in the evening sky, in spring, Creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself, The way a look or a touch reveals its unexpected magnitudes. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens