Of the Surface of Things
Encyclopedia
"Of the Surface of Things" is a poem from Wallace Stevens
's first book of poetry, Harmonium
(1923). It was first published in 1919, so it is in the public domain.http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4077
Buttel understands the poem as implementing Stevens's "anti-poetic" strategy of moving into a poem in an offhand way. He finds that the prose rhythms of the first stanza contrast strikingly with the metrical regularity of the quoted line about the belle undressing. That line is so delicately honest that it almost had to be quoted, in order to give the speaker some distance from it. The sturdy epistemic modesty of the first stanza contrasts with the intense opacity of the final stanza. Is it saying that the real tree basks in the illumination of imagination? Is the singer a poet like Whitman
, who pushes through what is prosaic ("three or four hills and a cloud") or beyond his understanding, in order to give full vent to his imagination in for instance "Song of Myself"? http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/whitman/song.htm
Milton Bates speculates that the "cloak" is probably the cloud and the "singer" one of the hills.
The poem can also be read as one of Stevens's many commentaries on the relation of imagination to reality: the poet's previously written line about the belle undressing (the imagination's formulation) contrasts with the actual scene portrayed in the first part of the poem. To the imagination the color of a tree is easily transformed. The "singer" in the penultimate line is, by such a reading, the poet who obscures the real world by pulling the cloak of his imagination over his head, enabling him to see the moon in its folds.
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...
(1923). It was first published in 1919, so it is in the public domain.http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4077
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Buttel understands the poem as implementing Stevens's "anti-poetic" strategy of moving into a poem in an offhand way. He finds that the prose rhythms of the first stanza contrast strikingly with the metrical regularity of the quoted line about the belle undressing. That line is so delicately honest that it almost had to be quoted, in order to give the speaker some distance from it. The sturdy epistemic modesty of the first stanza contrasts with the intense opacity of the final stanza. Is it saying that the real tree basks in the illumination of imagination? Is the singer a poet like Whitman
Whitman
-People:* Whitman , including:*Charles Whitman, tower sniper *Charles S. Whitman, New York politician *Walt Whitman, American essayist and poet *Marcus Whitman, was an American physician and Oregon missionary....
, who pushes through what is prosaic ("three or four hills and a cloud") or beyond his understanding, in order to give full vent to his imagination in for instance "Song of Myself"? http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/whitman/song.htm
Milton Bates speculates that the "cloak" is probably the cloud and the "singer" one of the hills.
The poem can also be read as one of Stevens's many commentaries on the relation of imagination to reality: the poet's previously written line about the belle undressing (the imagination's formulation) contrasts with the actual scene portrayed in the first part of the poem. To the imagination the color of a tree is easily transformed. The "singer" in the penultimate line is, by such a reading, the poet who obscures the real world by pulling the cloak of his imagination over his head, enabling him to see the moon in its folds.