"Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" is a poem from Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

's first book of poetry,Harmonium

Harmonium (poetry collection)

Harmonium is a book of poetry by U.S. poet Wallace Stevens. His first book, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. He was in middle age at that time, forty-four years old. The collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines to several hundred...

. It was first published in 1918

1918 in poetry

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*Robert Graves marries Nancy Nicholson...

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Le Monocle de Mon Oncle (Canto VIII)  Like a dull scholar, I behold, in love,  An ancient aspect touching a new mind.  It comes, it blooms, it bears its fruit and dies.  This trivial trope reveals a way of truth.  Our bloom is gone. We are the fruits thereof.  Two golden gourds distended on our vines,  Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost,  Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.  We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed,  The laughing sky will see the two of us  Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains.

Quoted here is the eighth canto. (The whole poem
can be found elsewhere.) Canto I includes the line "I wish that I might
be a thinking stone."

Harold Bloom regaled his students with an
off-beat interpretation of Canto II's line, "Shall I uncrumple this
much-crumpled thing?", as alluding to an inactive sexual relationship to Elsie ("you", the Other).

Canto IV includes the verse,

This luscious and impeccable fruit of life

Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.

When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,

Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard
air.

Canto XI includes the verse,

If sex were all, then every trembling hand

Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.

And in canto XII the poem concludes with the verse,

Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued,

And still pursue, the origin and course

Of love, but until now I never knew

That fluttering things have so distinct a shade.

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." 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' failed marriage",
"about [his] middle age and romantic disillusion". She defends herself against the accusation of biographical
reduction, which elsewhere she directs against Joan Richardson's psychobiography of
Stevens,http://www.nybooks.com/articles/4775http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=4965 as follows.

It has been objected that a criticism
suggesting that poems spring from life is reductive, that is to say
that "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" is about Stevens' failed marriage is
somehow injurious to the poem. It seems to me normal to begin with the
life-occasion as we deduce it from the poem; it is only an error when
one ends there. To tether Stevens' poems to human feeling is at least
to remove him from the "world of ghosts" where he is so often located,
and to insist that he is a poet of more than epistemological questions
alone.

Vendler and Richardson disagree about how to understand Stevens' distinction between the "true subject" of a poem and "the poetry of the subject". For Richardson it corresponds to the difference between the infantile kernel of a Stevens poem and the surface of his words' appearance. For Vendler the true subject is an experience and the poetry of the subject is a rendering of it. Richardson is led from her conception of the subject -- "the fears and uncertainties of the boy who still crouched inside him" -- to diagnose the surface of the poem as reflecting "the American dissociation of sensibility that began with the first Puritans giving the rhetorical lie to the truth of their experience." Vendler thinks this is even worse than simply "ending there" in biography, for it leads away from the poetry of the subject, which in her view requires understanding the special role of syntax that allows Stevens to achieve his poetic effects. ("Stevens's words are almost always deflected from their common denotation, and his syntax serves to delay and to disarticulate....What an image was to Pound, a syllable was to Stevens.")http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=4965

See also "Two Figures in Dense Violet Night

Two Figures In Dense Violet Night

Two Figures in Dense Violet Night is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1923., so it is still under copyright. Only its first stanza is quoted here....

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