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Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. First published in 1915, it is in the public domain. First published in 1915, it is in the public domain.
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.
Another Harmonium poem that clearly reflects Stevens's reading of Nietzsche is "The Surprises of the Superhuman", which was also extracted from "Lettres d'un Soldat" for inclusion in the second edition. The poem is notable for its arch wit and the anti-poetical salutation, "Hi!", rather than as a solution to the problem of evil.
This poem can be read as a declaration of independence for American poetry. The new world's "inchling" poets [3] are defiant towards the traditional literary canon, and particularly defiant against the unnamed, arrogant, self-appointed gatekeeper of literary tradition; they are confident instead in their own free powers of innovation in the New World.
It can be read as one of his "poems of epistemology", as B. J. Leggett styles it in his Nietzschean reading of Stevens' perspectivism, [2] a minimalistic statement of his interest in the relationship between imagination and the world. The term 'gubbinal' may derive from 'gubbin', slang for a dullard, referring here to someone who takes the ...
The first displays the influence of haiku and orientalism on Stevens, the second evokes the romantic mystery of night, the third is a wry comment about the duality of the human condition, the dream in the fourth bears comparison to Klee and Chagall, the fifth acknowledges the subtlety of nature, and the sixth associates this subtlety with a ...