I think I prefer "The Idea of Order At Key West". I feel a bit about the
post-Harmonium Stevens the way I feel about the later Auden -- scattered
nuggets, but not the sustained achievement of the earlier work.
It's not that all poets ought to die at forty (though there is a strong case
to be made for Wordsworth), but it is rather a crossing-the-bar moment. The
one poet I really regret didn't live longer is Keats.
Robin
(Incidentally, did C.S.Lewis rip-off the first sentence quoted from Stevens?
I seem to remember him writing something like, "If you no longer believe in
god, you believe in nonsense" (or something).
[Sorry, Patrick
<g>
R.]
----- Original Message -----
From: "Max Richards" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008 11:40 PM
Subject: Stevens TLS poet of last week
TLS February 12, 2008
Presence of an External Master of Knowledge
by Wallace Stevens;
introduced by Mick Imlah
"If one no longer believes in God (as truth)", Wallace Stevens once wrote,
"it is not possible merely to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in
something else."
For Stevens, born into an affluent family in Pennsylvania in 1879, that
"something else" was poetry, conceived of as an independent quest for
meaning. This "belief" underpins his late poem, "Presence of an External
Master of Knowledge"; the poem also relates to Tennyson's "Ulysses" (1842),
whose ageing narrator resolves to "follow knowledge like a sinking star, /
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought".
The TLS published "Presence of an External Master of Knowledge in Stevens's
seventy-fifth year, in 1954. He died the following summer.
Presence of an External Master of Knowledge
Under the shape of his sail, Ulysses,
Symbol of the seeker, crossing by night
The giant sea, read his own mind.
He said, "As I know, I am and have
The right to be." He guided his boat
Beneath the middle stars and said:
"Here I feel the human loneliness
And that, in space and solitude,
Which knowledge is: the world and fate,
The right within me and about me,
Joined in a triumphant vigor,
Like a direction on which I depend . . .
A longer, deeper breath sustains
This eloquence of right, since knowing
And being are one the right to know
Is equal to the right to be.
The great Omnium descends on me,
Like an absolute out of this eloquence."
The sharp sail of Ulysses seemed,
In the breathings of that soliloquy,
Alive with an enigma's flittering,
And bodying, and being there,
As he moved, straightly, on and on
Through clumped stars dangling all the way.
WALLACE STEVENS (1954)
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