thoughts from a master, part one

Selected from Wallace Stevens' "Adagia," published in his Opus Posthumous, pulled down from Mama Baroque's bookshelf yesterday. I'm typing them in here - there are an awful lot of them, and this is only selections - partly because I want to keep them and it's not my book, and partly because I'm thinking about a rarified thing: how we think about poetry. How we think about it as readers, yes, and also how we think about making it.

I'm writing quite a lot, and finding that I don't really feel like thinking about that too close to the surface. I could never, for example, do what Jane Holland did and describe the process of "fixing" a poem. To be honest I could barely even read the description! Too scary: once you've analysed how you do it it might never come back. I can remember doing my first-ever revisions in my early teens, and thinking: I have no idea if this is how writers do it! My methods have not changed in any real way since then.

I guess that's why good old Baroque in Hackney is so different from other so-called "poetry blogs" (so-called in my case, not theirs; they are much more brass tacks!). I just circle around the "how-to" part, but am passionately interested in the techincal part, and also in the more general ideas that might, if recognised within oneself, help to create an atmosphere in which falseness - of thought, feeling, observation, tone, even subject matter - cannot easily thrive.

Stevens writes:

Progress in any aspect is a movement through changes of terminology.

Each age is a pigeon-hole.

It is not that one purpose is as justifiable as another but that some purposes are pure, others impure. Seek those purposes that are purely the purposes of the poet.

Merit in poets is as boring as merit in people.

Definitions are relative. The notion of absolutes is relative.

Wisdom asks nothing more.

Parfait Martinique: coffee mousse, rum on top, a little cream on top of that.

It is life that we are trying to get at in poetry.

After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

Art, broadly speaking, is the form of life or the sound or colour of life. Considered as form (in the abstract) it is often indistinguishable from life itself.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.

A grandiose subject is not an assurance of a grandiose effect but, most likely, of the opposite.

Art involves vastly more than the sense of beauty.

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

Poetry is not personal.

The romantic cannot be seen through: it is for the moment willingly not seen through.

The real is only the base. But it is the base.

Abstraction is a part of idealism. It is in that sense that it is ugly.

Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognise this.

All poetry is experimental poetry.

One has a sensibility range beyond which nothing really exists for one. And in each this is different.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

There is nothing beautiful in life except life.

The poet is the intermediary between people and the world in which they live and also, between people and themselves; but not between people and some other world.

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

Poetry is not the same thing as the imagination taken alone. Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelations or interactions.

All of our ideas come from the natural world. Trees=umbrellas.

The ideal is the actual become anaemic. The romantic is often pretty much the same thing.

A poet must have something by nature and he must know more about the world by reason thereof.

The poet feels abundantly the poetry of everything.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

Money is a kind of poetry.

Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words, occasionally of the dissatisfied thinker to find satisfaction through his emotions.

The thing said must be the poem not the language used in saying it. At its best the poem consists of both elements.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as to have something to say.

The aesthetic order contains all other orders but is not limited to them.

Religion is dependent on faith. But aesthetics is independent of faith. The relative positions of the two might be reversed. It is possible to establish aesthetics in the individual mind as immeasurably a greater thing than religion. Its present state is the result of the difficulty of establishing it except in the individual mind.

The ultimate value is reality.

Realism is a corruption of reality.

Poetry is the sum of its attributes.