Hi Bill,

I am so glad you came back.

Like you, I was initially confused about “The Emperor of Ice Cream” until I read a few explanations of it on the net. And now, I think I understand it, and I do like it. You’re right; Stevens is continually harping on the same themes, those of mortality, denial of the old myths, and of experiencing the world through the senses – the senses, indeed, are Stevens’s gods -- and converting that experience into his own ‘music’ or creed. This is why I call him an aesthete. What I like very much in this one (besides ‘concupiscent curds’, which makes me giggle, and the absence of the bow-tied philosopher) is his stark insistence on the bare finality and nakedness of death. Shine a light on it. 'Let be be finale of seem.' And I'm struck by the contrast between the youth and vitality of S1, and the death in S2. Our life is like ice cream, and for those of us who like ice cream, it can indeed be sweet and delicious. But it melts away, we consume it, it is gone. So, be the emperor of ice cream, for there is no other. There is something almost heroic in Stevens’s obsession with death, his embrace of it, which actually feels more like defiance -- almost like Camus (minus the ethical imperative, which is a huge difference). And like Nietzsche, if you set aside his doctrine of eternal recurrence. I hear very much of Nietzsche in WS.

Last night I was trying to think of a love poem Stevens had written – not love of experience, or love of sensation, but love of a person. I actually googled the subject this morning, since my books are back east, and came up with poems that are mostly restatements of Stevens’s aesthetic ‘religion’, some of which are quite good, like this and this. Can you think of a good Stevens love poem, I mean, to a flesh and blood person, that is not an aesthetic recapitulation? If so, I would very much like to read it.

Again, glad to hear your voice on this thread!

Walter,

I was also thinking about your comments last night. Sounds like you’ve been diving into semiotics. Brave man! Don’t you think portmanteau words are ‘second order’ words that derive their meaning from ‘first order’ words, and, absent onomatopoeia and such, are still arbitrarily related to the signified? Seems to me perhaps they are. BTW, I am a huge fan of 'the gay Austrian' and delighted to see him mentioned.

Also, IIRC, Jarrell had some funny and impatient things to say about WS’s ‘baby talk’. I wish I had my Jarrell at hand, but he wasn’t a fan… I appreciated hearing a different view from you.

Certainly many, probably most, words are arbitrarily related to what they signify. However, I would say that the influence of onomatopoeia is greatly underplayed. One wonders why certain sounds for certain words caught on while others did not. It is no coincidence that in synthetic (agglutinative) languages common words are the shortest. While this is not exactly onomatopoeia (is, for example, does not imitate any sound), the sense and utility shape the sound. Can you imagine having to say "obladobladoblado" when you mean "no"? Our language generally evolves into what is most easy.

Also, yes, portmanteaux are second order words, which is why I am more impressed by vorpal or callooh: non-portmanteau words that convey their meaning through sound.

At university, I was probably alone in thinking that the division between sound and sense, which is the division between sign and what is signified, is not nearly as strong as generally believed. Perhaps I was and continue to be overly poetic. Saussure's response to onomatopoeia was that because different languages imitate sounds differently, the link between sound and sense is weak. His argument, however, doesn't take into account that animal sounds in other languages are remarkably similar and that any variation can be accounted for by each language's unique phonological properties.

In some kind of support of Walter [dba Orwn], I suggest that the average human brain contains many latent neural links between speech areas, muscle memory, and behavior modeling and mirroring areas. If they exist strongly enough, they would tend to shape language sounds into forms most compatable with common behavioral activity sequences. There wouldn't have to be world-wide identity as to the sounds, just tendencies reinforced by local social agreement. Very speculative, but consider how brief the basic terms used for "self" usually are: rarely more than two syllables, often just one.

xxxx

Walter, thanks for your clear and intelligent response. I think you can wear it as a badge of honor if you were/are “overly poetic”. A bit OT, but I’m curious, and this relates to Allen's last comment: did you study Chomsky, and what did you make of his universal grammar theory? I grant you that is a big topic and perhaps needs its own thread…

Aaron, I just got around to your link. Hyperboreans… that jostles something in the attic of my brain. Stevens and Nietzsche as Hyperboreans -- my dear man, I think I buy that.

Allen (referring to your post on a previous page), that’s a challenging project! I’m hoping someone else can take it up. I’m talking too much, I fear.

My sense of Stevens is actually just the opposite, I think, at least based on the few poems I know well (basically just No Possum, No Sop, No Taters and Man Carrying Thing). The Hyperboreans are a mythic race beyond the northern cold. Get past the cold and you find gentle climes, and there the Hyperboreans celebrate.

Stevens, in contrast, seems to content to stop just there, in the cold itself, and sing there. He rejects the idea that one could push further, past the cold, to find something better. No, rather:

It is here, in this bad, that we reach
The last purity of the knowledge of good.

Extremely provocative, Aaron! Wonderful! I have to run (thankfully, so I'll shut up for awhile), but what do you make of this?

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.

Michael, that is one of his best poems.

I wrote a little poem about an imaginary exchange between Robert Browning's ghost and Stevens in a restaurant in 1935. The poem plays on both poets' use of certain exclamatory words, like Browning's "zooks!" (Fra Lippo Lippi), for example, and Stevens' use of things like "huff and hum" and "hullabaloo", and the infamous "Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk."

But, we can't post our own poems in discussion threads. Ask me if you want me to send you a link to it. You might enjoy it, in light of this discussion. I've thought about posting the poem in Metrical, but I'm not terribly interested in asking for critique of it. Decisions, decisions...

I think we need a thread on Browning. Have you read Browning much? If you haven't you certainly must. Don't let yourself die without at least tapping into Fra Lippo Lippi and The Ring and the Book. Sordello you can miss, since no-one understood it except the author, though I love it, and for the same reasons I love The Comedian as the Letter C.

Bill,

I enthusiastically agree with you on this poem. I'm with WS all the way, through tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk, right to the widow's wince.

I have not read much Browning, but on your recommendation, I shall add him to my Urgently Required Attention list, stat. I'd be pleased for you to send me a link by PM to your poem.

M

Wallace Stevens : The Woman in Sunshine

It is only that this warmth and movement are like
The warmth and movement of a woman.

It is not that there is any image in the air
Nor the beginning nor end of a form:

It is empty. But a woman in threadless gold
Burns us with brushings of her dress

And a dissociated abundance of being,
More definite for what she is—

Because she is disembodied,
Bearing the odors of the summer fields,

Confessing the taciturn and yet indifferent,
Invisibly clear, the only love.

(1948: from The Auroras of Autumn)