[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Tosee the stars in this way is to awake from the stolid sensual drowse of theDanes in Denmark, for whom the outlandish was [only] another day/ Of theweek, [just slightly] queerer than Sunday. Exposed to the auroras, Stevens,like Melville s dying soldier, has been enlightened by the glare, and the finalflippancy of the last canto, juggling discrepant phases of man s feelings and theworld s landscapes, still yields, at the end, to the total reign of the auroras, these lights/ Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter s nick. It is these flaringlights, and the apprehensive questions they raise, that are the radiant centerof the poem: Stevens theatrical auroras and his repeated interrogations ofthem create his most ravishing lines.From this, the most economical and yetthe most brilliant of his long poems, he will pass on to the looser and quieterrecapitulations of An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.NOTES1.Credences of Summer was first published in Transport to Summer (Knopf, 1947).TheAuroras of Autumn followed the next year in The Kenyon Review, 10 (Winter 1948): 1 10,and was republished in the volume of which it was the title poem (Knopf, 1950).2.Frank Kermode s simplistic account of Stevens tone of rapture in his totalsatisfaction, the moment of total summer.the paradise of living as and where one lives, in this passionate celebration of this August heat (Wallace Stevens, pp.106 107) has beensomewhat corrected by later readers.Joseph Riddel, for instance, sees a lingeringnostalgia but concludes that it is a time for marriages, for balances (The Clairvoyant Eye,pp.218, 223), a phrase which scants Stevens own uneasiness that will find full voice in TheAuroras of Autumn.3.See Wallace Stevens by Michael Lafferty, Historical Review of Berks County, 24(Fall 1959): 108: The whole series, Credences of Summer, seems written inreminiscence of a hike over Mount Penn, from whose Tower Stevens could see Oley, toorich for enigmas. 4.It seems possible that Stevens central construct in Credences of Summer the mountain,the throne, the old man may owe something to Wordsworth s Excursion (IX, 48ff): 141Douceurs, TristessesRightly it is saidThat man descends into the VALE of years.Yet have I thought that we might also speak,And not presumptuously, I trust, of Age,As of a final EMINENCE; though bareIn aspect and forbidding, yet a pointOn which tis not impossible to sitIn awful sovereignty; a place of power,A throne, that may be likened unto his,Who, in some placid day of summer, looksDown from a mountain-top, say one of thoseHigh peaks, that bound the vale where now we are.Faint, and diminished to the gazing eye,Forest and field, and hill and dale appear,With all the shapes over their surface spread.5.Harold Bloom in The Central Man, Massachusetts Review, 7 (Winter 1966): 38,cites Emerson and Dickinson as other users of the image of the auroras.6.I adopt here the punctuation of the first printing of The Auroras of Autumn in theKenyon Review.The sense and cadence of this passage seem to require a period, not acomma, after dreams, and the Collected Poems has no absolute authority.There is nopunctuation at all, for instance, in the Collected Poems following the word base (Auroras i,l.13) though something is clearly needed.The KR version has Stevens familiar threeperiods.In vi, the KR does not have the hyphens in half-thought-of, and it has a simpleperiod instead of three periods after l.18.There is also a simple period closing viii.Thenext edition of Stevens will doubtless be a variorum.7.I have been told by Harold Bloom that Chatillon is the proper name of aRenaissance translator of the Bible from Hebrew into Latin and French, one SebastiánCastellio (1515 1563), or Castalion, as he is sometimes called (see Enciclopedia UniversalIllustrada, Madrid, s.v.Castalion).The passage remains obscure, and perhaps the choice ofname may rather be dictated by Stevens recurrent châteaux, built by his figuresresembling, in their desire for a mise-en-scène, the father of Auroras.See, for instance, Architecture, an early poem later dropped from Harmonium:ArchitectureWhat manner of building shall we build?Let us design a chastel de chasteté.De pensée.In this house, what manner of utterance shall there be?What heavenly dithyrambAnd cantilene?What niggling forms of gargoyle patter?And how shall those come vested that come there?In their ugly reminders? 142Helen Hennessy VendlerOr gaudy as tulips?.As they climb the flightsTo the closesOverlooking whole seasons?Let us build the building of light.Push up the towers to the cock-tops.These are the pointings of our edifice,Which, like a gorgeous palm,Shall tuft the commonplace.How [shall we] carve the violet moonTo set in nicks? (OP, 16 17)This sketchy poem reads like a first draft of the idea for Credences of Summer and TheAuroras of Autumn, both poems composed in the closes/ Overlooking whole seasons. The tower, the company of actors, their speech, their garments, even the word nick(though perhaps in a different sense) are all points in common, as is the prescribing of aritual. ROBERT LANGBAUMNew Modes of Characterization inThe Waste LandOne sign of a great poem is that it continues to grow in meaning.A newgeneration of readers can find in the poem their own preoccupations, andcan use those preoccupations to illuminate the poem, to find new meaningsin it.Presumably the poem contains the germ of all these accrued meanings;that is why it is great and endures.Certainly no poem ever seemed more ofits time than The Waste Land, which expressed, as we used to hear, the despairand disillusion of the twenties.Yet a survey of Waste Land criticism illustratesperfectly the reciprocal relationship between poem and criticism in thegrowth, indeed transformation, of a poem s meaning.The first stunned, admiring critics Conrad Aiken in 1923, I.A.Richards in 1926 saw the poem as completely incoherent and completelynegative in meaning.Richards saw Eliot as accurately describing thecontemporary state of mind.by effecting a complete severance between hispoetry and all beliefs, and remarked the absence of any coherentintellectual thread upon which the items of the poem are strung. F.R.Leavis(1932) saw in the note on Tiresias a clue to the poem s unity as the unity of an inclusive consciousness, but saw no progression: the poem ends whereit began. Really constructive criticism begins with F.O.Matthiessen (1935)and continues with such critics as Cleanth Brooks (1939) and GeorgeWilliamson (1953), who, taking Eliot s notes seriously, find progression,unity, and positive meaning through the built-in analogy with the Grail andFrom Eliot in His Time: Essays on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of The Waste Land.© 1973by Princeton University Press.143 144Robert Langbaumvegetation myths
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]