Tag: wallace stevens

Poetry by Alex Sheremet
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An ice-cream man holding a cone with a crown on his head, as part of Alex Sheremet's critical analysis of Wallace Stevens's misunderstood poem, "The Emperor of Ice-Cream", as appears in the automachination literary magazine.

ANALYSIS: Misreading Wallace Stevens’ “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”

It is all in the voice—or maybe in its emphasis. Every great poem has its own POV, though the wrong voice will diminish it. After all, good sound is measured by its meaning, and sometimes, a woman’s voice feels best for reciting “masculine” poetry. In Dana Gioia’s grim reading of Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” there is nothing left to probe. He is severe where the language is playful, entombing his analysis with guesswork every time he misses a tone. Another reading, from the archconservative Hillsdale College, is uncomfortable to watch, with a trite, melancholy piano that further damages interpretation. By contrast, the poem’s best recital is from a high school student almost twenty years ago. She is energetic, picks up on double (and overt!) meanings, and communicates this knowledge on stage. Her performance works because it does not engage the academic debate—it only speaks the words as written, which appear bigger, broader, and more festive than in the mouths of academics: […]

Poetry by Ezekiel Yu
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Chardin's painting, Le philosophe lisant, which may have served as inspiration for Wallace Stevens's poem, Large Red Man Reading

The Spirits Drawn Down: On Wallace Stevens’s “Large Red Man Reading”

The above painting is by Chardin, and it is titled Le Philosophe lisant. I first came across it not in a gallery, but in an essay. It was written by George Steiner, and in it he attempts to unpack its meaning via the symbols Chardin assembles on the canvas and make larger commentary on the act of reading: its history, its presentation in the painting, and its state in contemporary society. It’s not a bad essay, and Steiner is clearly learned, but the main and immediate impression I got from it was how, after looking the painting up on the Internet, it may have been the inspiration for Wallace Stevens’s great poem “Large Red Man Reading”. Stevens seemed to have an abiding interest in French culture (sprinkling words and phrases of the language in his own poetry) and it would not surprise me if the poem was an ekphrastic one, based on Chardin’s famous painting. Anyway, that’s just a little curio, to start things off. Steiner focuses intensely on the silence of the painting (and silence’s importance in concentrated engagement with a text) but Wallace Stevens’s poem veers away from silence, philosophizing even further than Steiner’s rather staid scholarship. […]

Poetry by Ezekiel Yu
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Man carrying thing, used as a photo for the Wallace Stevens poem

Analysis: Wallace Stevens’s “Man Carrying Thing”

I won’t miss this day. In fact, I’ll try to make up for it by jotting down my thoughts on a Wallace Stevens poem, “Man Carrying Thing”. I just memorized it (hopefully it sticks) and it’s a fun thing to rattle off and attempt to wrap your head around. He wrote these incredibly eloquent, philosophical puzzles that require multiple readings and deep thought to unpack, if not fully understand. I’m not sure most of Stevens’s poems have a singular, unitary meaning. Perhaps some of the simpler ones do. However, most of the famous, great Stevens poems possess a multiplicity (not infinity) of meanings that merge and interweave and clash. The act of reading his poems isn’t trying to find out what they mean – as if each one came with a packaged, one-sentence definition. It’s parsing out each part, uncovering different meanings and how they interact to form a complex yet congruous whole – certainly one that requires many paragraphs, if not entire pages (books, even!), to elaborate on. The thing I love most about Stevens’s poems is how many questions unravel after landing on a likely answer. Again, there’s a limit to these questions, but the point is that his poems are a delight to return to again and again, since they seem to grow in stature and meaning as one grows in life experience. Without further ado, here’s the poem. […]