Wallace Stevens foi um poeta modernista norte-americano. Educado em Harvard e depois na New York Law School, trabalhou em uma companhia de seguros em Connecticut na maior parte de sua vida.
Seus poemas mais conhecidos incluem "Anedota de um jarro", "Desilusão das dez horas", "O Imperador do Sorvete", "A Ideia de Ordem em Key West", "Manhã de Domingo" e "Treze maneiras de olhar para um melro".
“O poeta é o sacerdote do invisível.”
The poet is the priest of the invisible
Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose - Página 169, de Wallace Stevens, Samuel French Morse - Publicado por Knopf, 1957 - 300 páginas
“O poema deve resistir à inteligência / Quase com sucesso.”
The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully
The palm at the end of the mind: selected poems and a play - Página 281, de Wallace Stevens - Publicado por Knopf, 1971 - 404 páginas
“There are men of the East, he said,
who are the East.”
"Anecdote of Men by the Thousand"
Contexto: There are men of the East, he said,
who are the East.
There are men of a province
who are that province.
There are men of a valley
who are that valley.
“Bethou him, you
And you, bethou him and bethou. It is
A sound like any other. It will end.”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Contexto: Eye without lid, mind without any dream —These are of minstrels lacking minstrelsy,
Of an earth in which the first leaf is the tale
Of leaves, in which the sparrow is a birdOf stone, that never changes. Bethou him, you
And you, bethou him and bethou. It is
A sound like any other. It will end.
Esthétique du Mal (1944)
Contexto: One might have thought of sight, but who could think
Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees?
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
But the dark italics it could not propound.
And out of what sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live.
“What chieftain, walking by himself, crying
Most miserable, most victorious,”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
Contexto: p>What chieftain, walking by himself, crying
Most miserable, most victorious,Does not see these separate figures one by one,
And yet see only one, in his old coat,
His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town,Looking for what was, where it used to be?</p
“To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Contexto: p>But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real will from its crude compoundings come,Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,
Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,The fiction of an absolute — Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.
Peter Quince at the Clavier (1915)
Contexto: Beauty is momentary in the mind —
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden's choral.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Contexto: p>Is there a poem that never reaches words And one that chaffers the time away?
Is the poem both peculiar and general?
There’s a meditation there, in which there seemsTo be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or
Not apprehended well. Does the poet
Evade us, as in a senseless element?</p
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Contexto: Like a page of music, like an upper air,
Like a momentary color, in which swans
Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences. The west wind was the music, the motion, the force
To which the swans curveted, a will to change,
A will to make iris frettings on the blank.
“Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.”
"The Emperor of Ice Cream"
Harmonium (1923)
Fonte: The Collected Poems
Contexto: Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
“Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.”
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
Contexto: Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.
Contexto: Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.
How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,
Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand
Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.
“Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.”
Fonte: The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
“The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become.”
Fonte: The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play
“We live in an old chaos of the sun.”
"Sunday Morning"
Harmonium (1923)
Contexto: We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or an old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Contexto: We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or an old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
"The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm"
Transport to Summer (1947)
Contexto: The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
“The mind can never be satisfied.”
"The Well Dressed Man With a Beard"
Harmonium (1923)
Variante: It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
Fonte: The Collected Poems
Contexto: Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house...
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
"The Snow Man"
Harmonium (1923)
Contexto: p>One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.</p
