Opus Posthumous by Wallace Stevens

Author:Wallace Stevens [Stevens, Wallace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79186-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

She then writes

… There are no banyans, frangipani nor

jack-fruit trees; nor an exotic serpent

life.

If she had said in so many words that there were banyans, frangipani, and so on, she would have been romantic in the sense in which the romantic is a relic of the imagination. She hybridizes the thing by a negative. That is one way. Equally she hybridizes it by association. Moon-vines are moon-vines and tedious. But moon-vines trained on fishing-twine are something else and they are as perfectly as it is possible for anything to be what interests Miss Moore. They are an intermingling. The imagination grasps at such things and sates itself, instantaneously, in them. Yet clearly they are romantic. At this point one very well might stop for definitions. It is clear enough, without all that, to say that the romantic in the pejorative sense merely connotes obsolescence, but that the word has, or should have, another sense. Thus, when A. E. Powell in The Romantic Theory of Poetry writes of the romantic poet,

He seeks to reproduce for us the feeling as it lives within himself; and for the sake of a feeling which he thinks interesting or important he will insert passages which contribute nothing to the effect of the work as a whole,

she is surely not thinking of the romantic in a derogatory sense. True, when Professor Babbitt speaks of the romantic, he means the romantic. Romantic objects are things, like garden furniture or colonial lingerie or, not to burden the imagination, country millinery.

Yes, but the romantic in its other sense, meaning always the living and at the same time the imaginative, the youthful, the delicate and a variety of things which it is not necessary to try to particularize at the moment, constitutes the vital element in poetry. It is absurd to wince at being called a romantic poet. Unless one is that, one is not a poet at all. That, of course, does not mean banyans and frangipani; and it cannot for long mean no banyans and no frangipani. Just what it means, Miss Moore’s book discloses. It means, now-a-days, an uncommon intelligence. It means in a time like our own of violent feelings, equally violent feelings and the most skilful expression of the genuine. Miss Moore’s lines,

the shadows of the Alps

imprisoning in their folds like flies in amber, the rhythms

of the skating rink

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.