Here are some aphorisms from Wallace Stevens' Adagia. I have added a bit of commentary, some of it harsh. There is no denying that Stevens is a very good poet indeed. But like many artists, he seems incapable of saying much that is intelligent about his craft. As Nietzsche says in the Fifth Book of The Gay Science #366, "Jedes Handwerk zieht krumm," "Every craft makes crooked." In the case of Wallace, the poet's craft appears to unfit him for thinking.
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Wisdom asks nothing more.
A poem is a meteor.
Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
If thought is an infection, then poetry is mental meltdown.
After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
What a paltry redemption! It would be better to say that there is no redemption than to say something as silly as this. Learn to live with the death of God, my friend! Don't insert a sorry substitute into the gap.
Poetry is not personal.
The earth is not a building but a body.
The poet must come at least as the miraculous beast and, at his best, as the miraculous man.
Life cannot be based on a thesis, since, by nature, it is based on instinct. A thesis, however, is usually present and living is the struggle between thesis and instinct.
Weather is a sense of nature. Poetry is a sense.
There are two opposites: the poetry of rhetoric and the poetry of experience.
The bare image and the image as a symbol are the contrast: the image without meaning and the image as meaning. When the image is used to suggest something else, it is secondary. Poetry, as an imaginative thing, consists of more than lies on the surface.
One has a sensibility range beyond which nothing really exists for one. And in each this is different.
Finally, something that makes sense and is true to boot.
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
Good advice for the would-be poet.
The individual partakes of the whole. Except in extraordinary cases he never adds to it.
Our man is back to saying something either false or meaningless.
What we see in the mind is as real to us as what we see with the eye.
Except that what we see with the eye is also in the mind.
The mind is the most powerful thing in the world.
There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.
Poetry is not a personal matter.
You already said that. I think I know what you mean. Care to expatiate?
Poetry is a means of redemption.
Silliness repeated remains silly.
Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
Excellent!
The imagination is the romantic.
There is a glimmer of insight here, but you need to work on it some more.
Poetry is not the same thing as the imagination taken alone. Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelations or interactions.
If the very being of things consists in their relations to other things, then there are no things — and no relations either.
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
This is sophomoric nonsense worse than the worst of Nietzsche. If I believe that p, it does not follow that p is true. But to believe that p is to believe that p is true. It is psychologically impossible to believe something one knows to be a fiction. And if all is fiction, then there are no truths or fictions, and talk of "exquisite truth" is empty verbiage.
Wine and music are not good until afternoon. But poetry is like prayer in that it is most effective in solitude and in the times of solitude as, for example, in the earliest morning.
You are right about wine but not about music. The second sentence, however, is right on target.
Intolerance respecting other people's religion is tolerance itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.
The great objective is the truth not only of the poem but of poetry.
That part of the truth of the world that has its origins in feeling.
Poetry is the expression of the experience of poetry.
The ideal is the actual become anaemic. The romantic is pretty much the same thing.
Nonsense. Much better is this: The ideal is the presently unattainable actual, the actual metaphysically Elsewhere and Elsewhen. The romantic is pretty much the same thing.
As the reason destroys, the poet must create.
Irrationalist rubbish. Say this instead: The fabrications of the poet offer welcome respite to the hard work of Reason as she labors to discern the truth.
The exquisite environment of fact. The final poem will be the poem of fact in the language of fact. But it will be the poem of fact not realized before.
A theist would be entitled to say this, but not you.
We live in the mind.
It is the explanation of things that we make to ourselves that discloses our character.
The subjects of one's poems are the symbols of one's self or of one of one's selves.
Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
A poem should be part of one's sense of life.
There is no difference between god and his temple.
I'll agree to that if you agree that there is no difference between you and your house.
Money is a kind of poetry.
Insufficiently specific. How about: Derivatives are a kind of poetry.
In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
So imagination is not a mode of consciousness? Think harder.
Everything tends to become real; or everything moves in the direction of reality.
What about you? Are you more real than you used to be?
The thing said must be the poem not the language used in the poem. At its best the poem consists of both elements.
The poet looks at the world somewhat as a man looks at a woman.
It follows that the poet looks at the world in several mutually incompatible ways.
To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as to have something to say.
Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagined are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet.
Here is something worth thinking about.
The ultimate value is reality.
Realism is a corruption of reality.
Look man, a good aphorism is not just some sophomorically clever verbiage! There has to be a clear thought, one that doesn't annihilate itself when one tries to think it.
The thing seen becomes the thing unseen. The opposite is, or seems to be, impossible.
The opposite of what? Don't you just love the qualification, "or seems to be. . ."?
The tongue is an eye.
The eye of the mouth, but rather myopic.
God is a symbol for something that can as well take other forms, as, for example, the form of high poetry.
Well, if "poetry is a means of redemption," then why not go whole hog and say this as well?
The great conquest is the conquest of reality. It is not to present life, for a moment, as it might have been.
Say what?
Reality is a vacuum.
But your thought is even more vacuous. And if "The ultimate value is reality," then it follows that the ultimate value is a vacuum.
Poetry is metaphor.
Such profundity!
The word must be the thing it represents otherwise it is a symbol. It is a question of identity.
So 'Boston' = Boston on pain of being a symbol. It makes some sense to say that God's words are things, but God is dead for you. You should learn to live with that 'fact' and not try to step into God's shoes.
When the mind is like a hall in which the thought is like a voice speaking, the voice is always that of someone else.
It is necessary to propose an enigma to the mind. The mind always proposes a solution.
The body is the great poem.
So I am the poet of my body as poem. Great news! Today I give myself the body of a 2:30 marathoner.
In sum, there is only one excellent aphorism in the whole bunch: "Sentimentality is a failure of feeling."
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Wow! Two inspirations to comment back to back! Stevens writes aphorisms like he writes poetry--outside the bounds of rational thought. Having written poetry and produced some sculpture, some of which was passable, it takes a passion and a suspension of logic to arrive at the connections that make poetic images strike us with new meaning or emphasize an emotion with ordinary images. I read poetry; I never read what poets write about poetry. Their work stands on its own. The value of a critic is not to tell us whether a work is good or not, but to tell us WHY a work has the impact it does. No critic can produce art of consequence, but no artist can properly tell why he did something. Never ask me why I drew or sculpted something the way I did. But I can tell you why another's work moves me.
Posted by: Bill | Tuesday, 29 March 2005 at 19:52
Bill, "Their work stands on its own." I agree. Stevens is an outstanding poet whether or not one agrees with me that his aphorisms ABOUT poetry are poor in quality. "The value of a critic is not to tell us whether a work is good or not . . ." Here I disagree. Aesthetic evaluation is a legitimate task of the critic.
Posted by: Bill Vallicella | Tuesday, 29 March 2005 at 21:45