{"id":26357,"date":"2011-10-03T00:00:38","date_gmt":"2011-10-03T04:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=26357"},"modified":"2011-10-03T00:00:38","modified_gmt":"2011-10-03T04:00:38","slug":"wallace-stevens-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2011\/10\/03\/wallace-stevens-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Wallace Stevens"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"&quot;Sunday Morning&quot; by Wallace Stevens (read by Tom O&#039;Bedlam)\" width=\"625\" height=\"469\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/gkQjosxv-lc?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>Stevens reading &#8220;Sunday Morning&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Yesterday was the anniversary of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wallace_Stevens\" target=\"_blank\">Wallace Stevens<\/a>&#8216; death (1879-1955).<\/p>\n<p>Frye may have written more extensively on Stevens than any other 20th century poet, except for Yeats and Eliot. Unlike the other two, however, Stevens certainly seemed to be a strongly personal favorite: not just a canonical figure a scholar would have to deal with, but a poet to be read for pleasure.<\/p>\n<p>Here he is in conversation with David Cayley:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Cayley:<\/strong>\u00a0Another poet about whom you&#8217;ve written a good deal is Wallace Stevens. Was he someone who challenged you in some way?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Frye:<\/strong>\u00a0When I was sixteen working in the Moncton public library, I used to pore over Untermeyer&#8217;s anthologies of modern American poets, and all there was of Stevens at the time was <em>Harmonium<\/em>, but that fascinated me. That had some of the same qualities that Eliot had, even though it was a very different kind of poetry. I found that Stevens was somebody who held up, whereas so many of the others, like the imagists, just dropped out of my sight. I didn&#8217;t cease to read them for pleasure, but Wallace Stevens remained something very central. Once the <em>Collected Poems<\/em>\u00a0came out, I decided I had to write an essay on Stevens.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cayley: <\/strong>Was that &#8220;The Realistic Oriole&#8221;?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Frye:<\/strong>\u00a0Yes. I find myself quoting Stevens very frequently, so frequently that when <em>The Great Code<\/em>\u00a0came out, the people who interviewed me by telephone from Sydney, Australia, wanted to know why the hell I&#8217;d put so much Wallace Stevens in, and I couldn&#8217;t tell them why, except that he just seemed to fit what I had to say.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cayley:<\/strong>\u00a0The reason I asked whether he challenged you was because he seems to me that some of those famous phrases you quote from Stevens &#8212; &#8220;the weight of primary noon,&#8221; &#8220;the dominant X,&#8221; &#8220;one confides in what has no concealed creator&#8221; &#8212; have a sense of the independent existence of nature and the sense of the imperialism of the imagination and the necessity of there being a struggle with no winner. It seemed to me that this might have challenged your sense of nature&#8217;s finally being taken inside the enlightened imagination.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Frye: <\/strong>Well, it was inside in him, too. <em>Description without Place<\/em>\u00a0tells you don&#8217;t live in a natural environment at all. You live in a coating, the husk of human culture or civilization, and you take nature in through that.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cayley:<\/strong>\u00a0So there&#8217;s nothing in Stevens that necessarily challenged your view, although it may have extended it or given it a language?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Frye: <\/strong>It extended it, yes. It didn&#8217;t set up anything I could not very easily come to terms with.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cayley:<\/strong>\u00a0I think of Stevens as an atheist.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Frye:<\/strong>\u00a0I think of Stevens as a Protestant. I know he turned Catholic on his death bed, but people do funny things on their death beds.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cayley: <\/strong>A nature with &#8220;no concealed author,&#8221; the earth as &#8220;all of paradise that we shall know,&#8221; the idea of a &#8220;supreme fiction&#8221; &#8212; I suppose that as a young man reading Stevens lines like these suggested atheism to me.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Frye:<\/strong>\u00a0He says &#8220;in the new world all men are priests,&#8221; and I think that he had a sense of man assigned to recreate the universe, just as Blake had. His attitude toward God was very like Emily Dickinson&#8217;s, who didn&#8217;t want to repudiate her faith but wanted to fight with it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cayley: <\/strong>What about the view of nature as uncreated?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Frye:<\/strong>\u00a0I think he disliked the thought of God as an artist, because again that writes off the human artist.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Cayley: <\/strong>I know nothing about Stevens personally except that he worked in insurance, and obviously my knowledge of this poetry is sketchy too. Was he in fact a religious man in his own way?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Frye: <\/strong>Oh, I think so, yes. Look at what he says about Easter in <em>Adagia<\/em>\u00a0in <em>Opus Posthumous<\/em>. He doesn&#8217;t very often commit himself to a religious statement, but it&#8217;s there, all right. (CW 24, 963-5)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Stevens reading &#8220;Sunday Morning&#8221; Yesterday was the anniversary of Wallace Stevens&#8216; death (1879-1955). Frye may have written more extensively on Stevens than any other 20th century poet, except for Yeats and Eliot. Unlike the other two, however, Stevens certainly seemed to be a strongly personal favorite: not just a canonical figure a scholar would have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[5,121],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anniversaries","category-poetry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Wallace Stevens - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2011\/10\/03\/wallace-stevens-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Wallace Stevens - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Stevens reading &#8220;Sunday Morning&#8221; Yesterday was the anniversary of Wallace Stevens&#8216; death (1879-1955). 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