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The poem's message is fairly simple. Stevens believed that poetry and literature in general had the ability to excite and inspire. He believed that the imagination was an overlooked tool with the innate capability of distinguishing a mundane life (i.e. the lives of those who wore 'white night gowns' to bed) from an exciting and fulfilling one.
Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock", which peppers the reader with visual images, would serve as a simple example, "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" as more complex. The Imagist poet and critic John Gould Fletcher wrote in 1923 that because of his honesty Stevens stands "head and shoulders" above the internationally famous aesthetes like Eliot , the ...
The dweller in the dark cabin may be understood to be the specifically poetical dreamer, like the old sailor in "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock". Stevens enjoins him not to sleep in his dream, but rather to explore its riches. If the sleeper rises to do so, he will not waken, for he is still in the dream.
Poetic drowsing is liable to attack by the Indian, or by Berserk in "Peacocks", defeating imagination's task of transforming the ordinary. This sense of danger is absent in such earlier poems as "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" (1915), where the old sailor need fear no such violence as he catches tigers in red weather.
Harold Bloom suggests that "the shadow of his fellows" that Stevens was trying to drive away was specifically Walt Whitman's influence, and that he did not succeed in transcending that influence. [5] Stevens eventually dismisses the idea of a colony as a kind of counterfeit of his original aspiration to overcome "locality".
The long sequence of possessive phrases Vendler refers to may be enumerated as: 'of the motions', 'of her wrist', 'of her thought', 'of the plumes', 'of this creature', 'of this evening', 'of sails', 'of her fan', 'of the sea', and 'of the evening'.
The Plot Against the Giant" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1917, [ 1 ] so it is in the public domain. The Plot Against the Giant
Holly Stevens quotes a letter of her father in which he writes, "I had in mind simply a man fairly well along in life, looking back and talking in a more or less personal way about life." [ 3 ] This is widely regarded as reticence about the poem's commentary on his domestic life, or, as Helen Vendler phrases it, the poem is "about Stevens ...