People
Personages
Personae
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Annotation
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Ackermann
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[Lavery]
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Alpha
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In
the sixth section of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” from Auroras
of Autumn, Stevens writes that “Reality is the beginning not the
end, / Naked Alpha” (400). Alpha,
then, is reality as the beginning of all things, not, as some believe, the
end of all things. Stevens
further describes Alpha as “the infant A standing on infant legs,”
which seems to show the frailty and innocence of the fresh reality.
He also states that “Alpha fears men or else Omega’s men / Or
else his prolongations of the human” (400).
This line implies that the Alpha character fears those who believe
reality to be the end of all things instead of correctly believing that it
is the beginning of all things. Finally,
Stevens writes that “Alpha continues to begin” (400), implying the
regeneration or recreation of reality with the imagination, a classic
theme in Stevens’s poetry. [Atkins]
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Anacharsis
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(600
BC) a Scythian philosopher who was entrusted with an embassy to Athens.
He was granted citizenship to Athens and was regarded as one of the
Seven Sages. He would often
travel foreign lands as well as the Greek countryside in quest for
knowledge which he would share upon his return to Athens.
He is, perhaps, most noted for comparing laws to spider webs- they
catch small flys but allow bigger ones to escape.
In Stevens' From the Packet of Anacharsis (CPP 317), Anacharsis is
found recalling lines that he had written near Athens. [Brigati]
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Ananke
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In
classical mythology, the personification of necessity. Alluded to in
“Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery.” [Lavery]
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Apollinaire,
Guillume
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(1880-1918)
A French poet whose original name was Wilhelm Apollinaris de
Kostrowitzki. [Crum]
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Arabian, An
(in my room)
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An
Arabian (in my room) from NSF is identified by Stevens in LWS #469 as the
moon. It intrudes into the
personal realm seeming to reveal meaning with its “damned
hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how” and its “primitive astronomy.” As one
example of “Life’s
nonsense,” it is merely a natural event that only seems to hold a
“strange relation.” [Haynes]
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Ariel
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In
Shakespeare's The Tempest Ariel was a fairy spirit who did the bidding of
Prospero. In "The Planet on the Table," a poem written in
response to the publication (in 1954) of Stevens' Collected Poems, Ariel,
we are told, "was glad he had written his poems" (450). Stevens,
then, is writing about himself in a fictional third person persona; Arial
= Stevens. [Lavery]
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Aristotle
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Aristotle
was a Greek philosopher who believed that human beings’ most important
purpose was to serve and improve humankind by emphasizing theory rather
than logic. Stevens mentions
Aristotle in “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit” (CP 288) by saying
if there must be a god in the house, let him move as if he is
Aristotle’s skeleton (among other examples). The images which Stevens
gives in this poem make it quite anti-religious; if there must be a god,
he cannot be active in our lives or a being capable of significant action,
such as a skeleton or a ghost. However, because the skeleton is Aristotle’s, it has some
far away important influence, but at the same time, Aristotle is a figure
of the past. [O’Neal] Esthétique
du Mal
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Ayer, A. J.
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(1910-89).
British analytic philosopher, professor at Oxford and the University of
London, author of Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), and a key figure in
the development of linguistic
analysis. [Lavery]
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B.
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B. is representative of all the great composers with last
names that begin with the letter “B," such as Bach, Beethoven,
Bruckner, Berlioz, and Brahms. "B." is in part four of
“Esthetique du Mal": “When
B. sat down at the piano and made / A transparence in which we hear music,
made music” (279). Esthétique
du Mal [Regensburg]
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Back-Ache,
The
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Personified
as the child of Saint John in Stevens' poem "Saint John and the
Back-Ache," the Back-Ache utters the opening lines that begin a
dialogue with Saint John. His
is the voice of reason closed-off from experience.
His view of existence is antithetical to that of Saint John, who
champions a position of sensuality over rationality. [Rhodes]
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Badroulbadour
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[Lavery]
The Worms at Heaven's Gate
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Balzac,
Honore de
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(1799-1850).
French novelist and short story writer, author of "The Human
Comedy," a twenty year enterprise in which he sought to offer a
comprehensive portrait of his time. Best known for Père Goriot (1835) and
Cousin Bette (1847).
[Lavery]
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Basilewsky
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Stevens’s
“Owl’s Clover: A Duck for Dinner” (581-86) argues that imagination
cannot thrive under communism (social regimentation).
In Section IV (584-85), Basilewsky, playing his “Concerto for
Airplane and Pianoforte” (2), provides one example of the negative
impact of communism [“The newest Soviet réclame” (3)] on artistic
production, specifically music: “Basilewsky’s
bulged before it floated, turned / Caramel and would not, could not
float” (26-27). [Wright]
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Bateson,
William
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(1861-1926).
British biologist, one of the first to apply Mendelian genetics to the
understanding of evolution. [Lavery]
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Baudelaire,
Charles
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[1821-67].
Major French symbolist poet, author of The Flowers of Evil (1857). [Lavery]
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Bawda
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Bawda
is a fictional character, a maiden, in the long Stevens poem “Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction.” She
appears in the fourth section of the poem, which deals with her marriage
to a “great captain” in Catawba.
The poem tells us that Bawda “loved the captain as she loved the
sun” (347), and he loved her as well as the place of their marriage.
It seems as if Stevens gives the maiden this name because it rhymes
with Catawba. This seems
fitting because, in this poem, Stevens writes that “They [Bawda and her
captain] married well because the marriage-place / Was what they loved.
It was neither heaven nor hell” (347). Naming the maiden Bawda associates her more closely with
the marriage place that was so well loved, and, therefore, makes it clear
that Bawda, too, was well loved by her captain. [Atkins]
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Belle
Scavoir
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Bouquet
of Belle Scavoir
Belle
Scavoir represents nature, and the bouquet and all of its contents are
merely derivative of nature. "It
is she [Belle Scavoir/ nature] alone that matters./ She made it." [Brigati]
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Belshazzar
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Biblical
son of Nebuschdnezzar, Babylon's last king. Alluded to in Country Words [Lavery]
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Bergson,
Henri
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(1859-1941).
Nobel Prize (in literature)-winning French philosopher, author of Matter
and Memory (1896; trans. 1911), Laughter (1900; trans. 1901), and Creative
Evolution (1907; trans. 1911). [Lavery]
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Bernard,
Emile
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[1868
- 1941]. French painter, known for his illustrations for literary works. [Lavery]
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Berserk
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Berserk
is the fictional character with whom the speaker of “Anecdote of the
Prince of Peacocks” has a conversation while walking through the night.
The speaker describes Berserk as “sharp,” “red,” and
“sun-colored” and asks Berserk why he is the way he is.
Berserk replies, “You that wander […] On the bushy plain, /
Forget so soon. / But I set my traps / In the midst of dreams” (46).
Berserk reminds the traveler that things, be it Berserk, the plain,
the moonlight, simply are. The
speaker says that “I knew the dread / Of the bushy plain, / And the
beauty / Of the moonlight” (46). This
seems to imply that the speaker realizes that the meanings he has placed
in these things have been merely the misdevotions of a foolish man. [Atkins]
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Bird with the
Coppery Keen Claws, The
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Represented
by the parakeet in Stevens' poem of this name (CPP 65).
The parakeet lives a life more in harmony with nature and in the
present in that it does not subscribe to or "undulate" with
"pure intellect" and apply "its laws" like humans.
To Stevens, the bird is without pretense and is able to live in the
moment and within nature free of supposition. [Brigati]
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Blanche
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A
designation for the moon in "The Man on the Dump." [Lavery]
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Blandina
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Blandina is a young girl who
appears in “Analysis of a Theme.”
The poem opens with the “theme” in which the speaker remembers
how happy he/she was telling “the young Blandina of three-legged
giraffes” (304). The
remainder of the poem is an analysis of this theme, an analysis of the
joys of imagination. [Crum]
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Blue Woman,
The
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This
is a character from the poem "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction."
She is described as looking out her window, "linked and
lacquered," perhaps with reference to wearing heavy jewelry and being
inebriated. She does not like what she sees and wishes the world to be
different. She wants it to appear more like her own memory. From her
window, she "named/ the corals of the dogwood." Her naming is
"coldly delineating" and "except for the eye, without
intrusion." Apart from what she sees from her window, what she tries
to own by naming, she is coldly detached from the world outside. [Haynes]
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Bonnie and
Josie
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These
two female characters (Stevens does not mention their ages) appear in his
poem “Life is Motion” (65). The
poem is set in Oklahoma, and Bonnie and Josie act as stereotypical Native
Americans as the dance around a stump, “[crying] ‘Ohoyaho, Ohoo. .
.” Bonnie and Josie revel in the very presence of nature. [O’Neal]
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Botantist on
Alp
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Earning
the title of two of his poems, both "Botanist on Alp (No. 1)"
and "Botanist on Alp (No. 2)" praise the art of poetry. To the
botanist, one who studies plants, the "Panoramas are not what they
used to be" (109). Nature and the way one views nature changed. By
using nature as a means of salvation, "Marx has ruined Nature,"
(109). The botanist knows the ideal world is non-existent. In "(No.
2)," Stevens states the necessity of poetry: "For who could
tolerate the earth / Without that poem, or without" (110). [Regensburg]
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Boucher
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An
18th century French painter whose depictions of mythological deities were
conveyed with a whimsy and playfulness that was true to the Rococo style.
Stevens mentions him in "Asides on the Oboe" as having
extinguished gods, likely interpreting Boucher's irreverence toward the
deities as symbolic of his own desire to view the world as free of gods.
[Rhodes]
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Bowl
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[Lavery]
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Bradley, F.
H.
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F.
H. Bradley (1846-1924). Absolute idealist British philosopher. His best
known work was Appearance and Reality (1924). [Lavery]
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Brahms
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(1833-1897),
German composer and pianist of the second half of the 19th century. A master of symphonic and sonata style, Brahms tried to
preserve the Classical tradition in a period when its standards were being
questioned or overturned by the Romantics.
In “Anglais Mort à Florence,” Brahms represents the lack of
imagination in that the Englishman enjoys the music of Brahms in a
passive, emotional way rather than as a scholar of musical form or
technique: “Music began to fail him.
Brahms, although / His dark familiar, often walked apart” (CPP
119, ll. 2-3). Furthermore, Brahms represents a dependence on tradition as
the Englishman’s vitality fades: “He used his reason, exercised his
will, / Turning in time to Brahms as alternate / In speech. He was that music and himself. […] / But he remembered
the time when he stood alone” (CPP 120, ll. 14-18).
[Wright]
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Braque,
Georges
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[1882-1963].
French cubist painter, a close friend of Picasso's. [Lavery]
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Brave Man,
The
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The
Brave Man is the term Stevens uses to describe the sun in his poem “The
Brave Man.” The sun, or the
Brave Man, makes “Green gloomy eyes / In dark forms of the grass / Run
away” (112). He also makes
“Fears of my bed, / Fears of life and fears of death, / Run away”
(112). The Brave Man takes on
all of these things and seems to be victorious, at least during the
daytime. Finally, Stevens
says that the Brave Man “comes up / From below and walks without
meditation” (112). “Walking
with meditation” implies the dependability and constant motion of the
sun: the sun never tarries, and it always continues on its path. [Atkins]
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Bridges,
Robert
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[1844-1930].
English poet, best known for The Testament of Beauty (1929) and his role
in establishing the work of his friend Gerard Manley Hopkins. [Lavery]
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Bronze Man,
The
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A
recurring idea which surfaces in Stevens' works. In This Solitude of
Cataracts (366), Stevens writes, "To be a bronze man breathing under
archaic lapsis," and in An Ordinary Evening in New Haven (403), he
also addresses the bronze man by writing, "We are not men of bronze
and we are not dead." For
Stevens, the bronze man represents the symbolic or statuesque which he
detests as they represent the idealized, antiquated and conventional, in
contrast with the major men who are beyond reality, yet composed thereof. [Brigati]
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Broomstick
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[Lavery]
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Bunyan, John
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[1628-88].
English author of Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666),
Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come (1678, 1684),
and other works. [Lavery]
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Burckhardt,
Jakob
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(1818-97).
Swiss cultural historian, friend of the philosopher Nietzsche, best known
for Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). [Lavery]
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Burgers of
Petty Death
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A
burgher is an inhabitant of a town, an ordinary citizen.
In “Burghers of Petty Death” the burghers are a man and a
woman, the “small townsmen of death” who await death “like two
leaves that keep clinging to a tree” (315).
The “petty death” the couple awaits is “a death of great
height and depth, covering all surfaces, filling the mind” (315).
Likewise, this death is “without any feeling, an imperium of
quiet, in which a wasted figure, with an instrument, propounds blank final
music” (315). It is hard to
discern what the speaker means by death in the poem, but it is most likely
something different than literal death—possibly spiritual or
intellectual death. For a
similar use of the word burgher in Stevens, see Weeping Burgher, The. [Crum]
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Burke,
Kenneth
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(1897-1993).
Controversial, unclassifiable American literary theorist and rhetorician,
most famous for books like The Philosophy of Literary Form, The Grammar of
Motives, and Language as Symbolic Action. [Lavery]
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Burnshaw,
Stanley
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(1906-
). American poet and critic, author of The Seamless Web:
Language-Thinking, Creature-Knowledge, Art-Experience (1970). [Lavery]
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Byzantines
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Byzantines
were citizens of Byzantium, an empire that lasting roughly a thousand
years that had its roots in the Eastern Roman Empire and whose capital is
modern Istanbul, Turkey. In “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” the
Byzantines appear “like the noise of tambourines” as attendants in the
Old Testament apocrypha story Susanna and the elders.
While the Byzantines whisper among themselves as to why Susanna has
“cried against the elders,” their lamps reveal “Susanna’s shame”
and they flee, expressing the same confused musical tones.
Following the trope of music already established in the poem, the
percussive quality of the tambourines, especially coming immediately after
the cymbal clash of Susanna’s discovery of being spied upon, expresses
both confusion and fear. Stevens’
notes in LWS #279 that to stumble over the factual anacronism of placing
“Byzantines” in the story is “a bit of precious pedantry.” [Haynes]
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Candide
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This
character in “The Comedian as the Letter C” (22) is a direct reference
to Voltaire’s novel Candide. The
protagonist of the novel, Candide, is a good-hearted but hopelessly naïve
young man. His mentor, Pangloss, teaches him that his family’s world is
"the best of all possible worlds." After being banished from his
adopted childhood home, Candide travels the world and meets with a wide
variety of misfortunes, all the while pursuing security and following his
cousin, Cunégonde, the woman he loves. His faith in Pangloss's undiluted
optimism is repeatedly tested. Stevens
describes Candide as “Yeoman and grub, but with a fig in sight,” much
like his protagonist Crispin who has encountered misfortune at the loss of
whatever poetic capability he once possessed.
At the mention of
Candide in the poem, though, Crispin tries to be optimistic that his
talent will return after his mind has been blown by the sea. [O’Neal]
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Canon
Aspirin, The
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Canon Aspirin is a character in "Notes Toward a
Supreme Fiction" (329-352). Canon reaches a point "Beyond which
thought could not progress as thought" (348). He loses all hope for
imagination. He is concerned with his sister's children, and in regards to
reality and imagination, "He chose to include the things / That in
each other are included, the whole, / The complicate, the amassing
harmony" (348). Sukenick explains in Musing the Obscure that Canon
chooses both because "thought is based on the fact of reality, and
our view of that fact is affected by our thought" (156).[Regensburg]
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Canon
Aspirin’s Sister
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Mentioned
in Section Five, under the topic of "It Must Give Pleasure," in
"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," Canon Aspirin's Sister is a
sensible woman. According to
Canon Aspirin, this approach to life produces happiness. She is widowed and lives with her two young daughters.
She is not idealistic about her children and perceives them
realistically, knowing her high estimation of them far exceeds anyone
else's. Living simply and
realistically, she provides a contrast to her brother, who dreams up a
"fugue/Of praise" for her. [Rhodes]
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Captain,
The
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[Lavery]
Life on a Battleship
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Carlos Among
the Candles
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“Carlos
Among the Candles” is the title (only) character of the play of the same
name (615-620). Because he is
described as “an eccentric pedant of about forty” who “speaks in a
lively manner, but is over-nice in sounding his words” (615), Carlos is
believed to be a self-caricature of Wallace Stevens.
Carlos, by lighting and extinguishing candles one at a time, acts
out the play’s intention “to illustrate the theory that people are
affected by what is around them. […] Take, for example, (instead of a
mountain or of a morgue), a single candle.
If this is true of a single candle, then it is possible to trace
variations of effect by varying the number of candles” (Letters 201).
[Wright]
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Carpenter,
This
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[Atkins]
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Cassirer,
Ernst
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(1874-1945).
German philosopher, author of such works as The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms (1923-1929) and An Essay on Man (1945). [Lavery]
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Cat
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In
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven (CPP 397), the Cat thinks the whole world
exits for them and does not necessarily realize they are merely a part in
it. Similarly, in Someone Puts a Pineapple Together (CPP 693), the
descriptions of the imagery are regarded to be to Cat's taste, suggesting
the assumption that their environment revolves around them.
A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts (CPP 190), gives the reader a
similar image of the "Fat cat" or one who represents false
heroics, but here the cat is in the shadows of the rabbit "king"
and appears to be a small player in the world of the rabbit, thus,
reinforcing that all beings play a role in nature. [Brigati]
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Cervantes,
Miguel de
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(1547-1616).
Spanish novelist, dramatist, and poet, whose masterpiece was Don Quixote
de la Mancha (1605), a book he wrote while in prison. [Lavery]
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Chatueaubriand
|
[1768-1848].
Prominent French Romantic literary figure, author of The Genius of
Christianity (1802), René (1805), Memoirs from beyond the Tomb (1849-50),
and other works. [Lavery]
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Chieftain
Iffucan
|
Bantams
in Pine-Woods
|
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Church, Henry
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[Lavery]
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Claude
|
Claude
Lorrain was a landscape painter (1600-1682) much admired in eighteenth
century England. His admirers
sought to recreate in their own gardens, his ideal panoramas, often
introducing classical architectural “ruins” and “temples” to
enhance the effect. Stevens’s
poem, “Botanist on Alp (No.1)” (p. 108), states that, “Claude has
been dead a long time.” For
Stevens, the idealized world connoted by the term “Claude,” is
artificial and obsolete. The poem points out that in reality, the
“pillars are prostrate, the arches haggard.” [Haynes]
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Clementina,
Victoria
|
Victoria
appears in one of Stevens’s character sketch poems, “Exposition of the
Contents of a Cab” (CP 52). Victoria
is an African American lady who “Took seven white dogs to ride in a
cab.” Stevens emphasizes her need to validate herself in a world
(and a time period, indicated by the horse drawn cab) that essentially
ignores her—“She too is flesh.”
He also accentuates Victoria’s tendency toward the grandiose, but
it is her version of grandeur which is most likely, in Stevens’s
opinion, shabby and worn. Her
clothes are the cast off grandeur of yesterday revived by a woman who
desperately wants to feel luxurious on a presumably low budget.
So, with her seven white dogs, she proudly gets into a cab to ride,
but she most likely appears absurd to the people who witness this event. [O’Neal]
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Coleridge,
Samuel Taylor
|
(1772-1834).
English Romantic poet, thinker, and critic. Co-author (with
Wordsworth) of the epoch-making Lyrical Ballads (1798), he wrote such
famous poems as "Kubla Khan" and "The Rhime of the Ancient
Mariner" and books such as Biographia Literaria (1817). [Lavery]
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Colleoni,
Bartolomeo
|
(1400–1475).
An Italian soldier of fortune, who switched allegiances between Milan and
Milan. A chapel named after him can be found in Bergamo, Italy, and he is
memorialized by a statue by Verrocchio in Venice. [Lavery]
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Constable,
John
|
[1776-1837].
Major English landscape painter. Alluded to in “Like Decorations in a
Nigger Cemetery.” [Lavery]
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Corazon
|
Corazon appears in "Poetry is a Destructive
Force" (178) and is the name Stevens assigns to mammals in this poem
about misery. "Corazon, stout dog, / Young ox, bow-legged bear, / He
tastes its blood, not spit." Misery is completely destructive in
poetry, and the pain is so great that Corazon tastes his own blood.
Referring to poetry, Stevens ends the poem with the powerful statement,
"It can kill a man" (178). Thus Corazon is Stevens: the poet who
experiences the destructive force of poetry. Poetry is a Destructive Force [Regensburg]
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Corot,
Jean-Baptiste
|
(1796-1875).
French landscape painter known for his realistic depiction of laborers and
peasants. [Lavery]
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Countryman,
The
|
The
countryman is a figure in Stevens' poem of the same name.
He appears as a man of the earth, taking in the pure physical
sensation of the Swatara River as he walks beside it.
He cares not of the origin, destination or name of the river, only
of its sounds and movement. [Rhodes]
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Crispin
|
The
major character of "The Comedian as the Letter C," a second-rate
poet (he writes "his couplet yearly to the spring" and thinker
("the Socrates/Of snails, musician of pears, principium/And
lex") who becomes "washed away by magnitude" on an ocean
voyage, aspires to write a more imaginative poetry of place, marries,
becomes a father, and has his poetic ambitions "clipped." [Lavery]
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Croce,
Benedetto
|
(1866-1952).
Italian philosopher and historian, opponent of Mussolini and Italian
fascism. [Lavery]
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Crow
|
In
“Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery” (CPP 124), the crow is the
musical opposite of the oriole: “From
oriole to crow, note the decline / In music” (XXV, 1-2).
Known for its harsh call, the crow represents harsh reality
[“Crow is realist” (XXV, 2)] as contrasted to the beautiful song of
the oriole. However,
when the speaker states, “But, then, / Oriole, also, may be realist”
(XXV, 2-3), he suggests that the beauty of the oriole’s song merely
masks the same harsh reality that is readily apparent in the crow. [Wright]
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Cuban Doctor,
The
|
The
Cuban Doctor is the speaker of the poem “The Cuban Doctor.”
We are told that he “went to Egypt to escape / The Indian,”
(51) but his attempt to escape seems to have failed.
In the second stanza of the poem, the Cuban Doctor’s state of
consciousness becomes ambiguous when he states that the Indian was not
something “on a comfortable sofa dreamed” (47). This ambiguity is reiterated in the closing lines of the
poem when the Doctor says, “I knew my enemy was near—I, / Drowsing in
summer’s sleepiest horn” (47). Stevens
leaves the reader unsure about the events of the poem, perhaps to
illustrate that the real is merely something imagined or created and
believing otherwise would simply be foolish. [Atkins]
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Dante
|
[1265-1321].
Italian poet, author of the Divine Comedy, the story of the author's
journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, and La Vita Nuova, devoted to
his beloved Beatrice and the nature of ideal love. [Lavery]
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De Goncourt
|
Two
brothers, Edmond Louis Antoine de Goncourt (1822-96) and Jules Alfred Huot
de Goncourt (1830-70), who became literary collaborators. [Lavery]
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De Quincey,
Thomas
|
(1785-1859).
English essayist, famous for Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822).
[Lavery]
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de Staël,
Mme
|
(1766-1817).
French-Swiss Romantic woman of letters, born Anne Louise Germaine Necker,
author of On Germany (1810) and Ten Years of Exile (1818) and novels like
Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807). [Lavery]
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Descartes,
René
|
(1596-1650).
French philosopher, the "father of modern philosophy," and
author of Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations (1642). His
Cartesian thought led to the development of philosophical
dualism. [Lavery]
|
|
Doctor of
Geneva, The
|
For
Stevens the Doctor of Geneva represents reason, "a man used to
plum." In contrast to
the "long-rolling opulent cataracts" of the sea, the Doctor of
Geneva is more akin to the finite (lakes, which have clear manageable
boundaries). In essence the
Doctor of Geneva is bound by reason and convention which Stevens' in some
ways seems to dislike. [Brigati]
|
|
Don Joost
|
[Lavery]
|
|
Doudan,
Xavier
|
[Lavery]
|
|
Dufy,
Monsieur [Raoul]
|
(1877-1953).
French painter, once associated with Fauvism, known for his watercolor
landscapes and seascapes.
Alluded to in Lions
in Sweden [Lavery]
|
|
Dwarf, The
|
In
“The Dwarf” the poet says “it is all that you are, the final dwarf
of you, that is woven and woven and waiting to be worn, neither as mask
nor as garment but as being, torn from insipid summer, for the mirror of
cold” (CPP 190-91). Hence,
“the final dwarf” seems to be a condition or a persona rather than a
character. [Crum]
|
|
Elders, The
|
The
Elders appear in part III of Stevens’ poem “Peter Quince at the
Clavier” (p. 73). Originally,
the characters come from the apocryphal story in the book of Daniel of
Susanna and the Elders. In
this tale, the moral and civic leaders of the Hebrews in exile are
revealed to be lascivious old men, who are willing to destroy the innocent
in order to retain their own reputations.
For Stevens, these represent the strong emotional impact of desire,
especially as expressed in aural art, such as in music and poetry. [Haynes]
|
|
Eliot, T. S.
|
(1888-1963).
American-born poet and critic, later a British citizen, author of such
great works as "The Wasteland" and Four Quartets. He and
Barfield were in a writing group together in London in the 1930s, and he
would later review several of Barfield's books favorably. [Lavery]
|
|
Emperor of
Ice Cream
|
The
Emperor of Ice Cream appears in his self-titled poem (CP 50) as the man in
charge of pleasure at an otherwise sad event, a funeral.
Looking literally at the poem, the “roller of big cigars,” the
muscular figure in the opening lines, the man who is, through his brute
strength, making ice cream, is the Emperor.
Sukenick calls him the pleasure master, for “The only
extraordinary thing in this occasion is to be pleasure, for pleasure is
the only power we will recognize to govern us” (Sukenick 63).
The Emperor and his ice cream serve as startlingly alive contrasts
to the dead woman in the second stanza. [O’Neal]
|
|
Ephebe, The
|
Ephebe is a youth between 18 and 20 years of age in
ancient Greece, typically a student. The term first appears in "Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction"(329-352) and is the one the speaker
addresses: "Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea" (329). The
speaker teaches the ephebe supreme fiction by breaking it into three
sections: It Must Be Abstract, It Must Change, and It Must Give Pleasure.
Thus the ephebe is a student of poetry. [Regensburg]
|
|
Ercole
|
Italian
for Hercules, Ercole appears in Section Six of "Extracts from
Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas."
He represents those invested in the rational at the expense of the
imaginative. [Rhodes]
|
|
Euclid
|
(c.
300 B.C.). Greek mathematician, author of The Elements, which laid the
foundations of plane geometry. Alluded to in “The Common Life.” [Lavery]
|
|
Eulalia
|
"A
Spanish martyr in the persecution of Diocletian (12 February, 304), patron
of the cathedral and city of Barcelona, also of sailors. The Acts of her
life and martyrdom were copied early in the twelfth century, and with
elegant conciseness, by the learned ecclesiastic Renallus
Grammaticus." [From The
Catholic Encyclopedia online] Alluded to in “Certain
Phenomena of Sound” [Lavery]
|
|
Fat Girl, The
|
The
“Fat girl” (X, 1) is a personification of the earth in “Notes Toward
a Supreme Fiction: It Must Give Pleasure” (351).
She serves as a muse for the poet, whose imagination transforms the
reality of the world [“my green, my fluent mundo” (20)] into poetry. [Wright]
|
|
Fernandez,
Ramon
|
Ramon
Fernandez is the fictional character in “The Idea of Order at Key
West” with whom the speaker recalls the woman the two saw who “sang
beyond the genius of the sea” (1).
Ramon and the speaker see this woman walking along
the beach, singing, and, for the speaker, she seems to be person who makes
her own worlds or “fictions,” for he says “that there never was a
world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made” (42-3).
Ramon
Fernandez is a part of this experience and is, like the speaker, able to
comprehend both the rarity and the importance of the event. [Atkins]
|
|
Fernando
|
Presumably
a fictitious character to whom the narrator of Stevens' “Hibiscus on the
Sleeping Shores” (18) directs the description of his observations. [Brigati]
|
|
Figure of the
Youth
|
[Lavery]
|
|
Foch,
Marshall
|
(1851-1929).
French military leader, famous for his defeat of the Germans at the Marne
(1914), and later came to command the unified British, French, and
U.S. armies. [Lavery]
|
|
Focillion,
Henri
|
[Lavery]
|
|
Freud,
Sigmund
|
(1956-1939).
The founder of psychoanalysis, author of such books as The Interpretation
of Dreams (1900), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922), The Future of an
Illusion (1928), and Civilization and Its Discontents (1928). [Lavery]
|
|
Fry, Roger
|
[1866-1934].
English art critic and painter, author of such books as Vision and Design
(1920) and Cézanne (1927), in which he championed modern French art. [Lavery]
|
Giant, The
|
Appears as a “question that is a giant himself” (307)
in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.”
The question in this sense is the “never-ending meditation” of
reason. In
“Gigantomachia” and “Repetitions of a Young Captain” the giant
seems to be a war hero or at least a soldier.
In “The Plot Against the Giant,” however, the giant is a yokel
who “comes maundering” (5). In
this poem the giant seems to be a person who fails to enjoy the beauty of
the physical world, fails to sense the “unsmelled flowers” and the
“cloths besprinkled with colors as small as fish eggs [. . . .
which] will abash him.” [Crum]
|
|
Gide,
André
|
(1869-1951).
French writer, a founder of the journal Nouvelle revue française, and
author of such novels as The Immoralist (1902), Lafcadio's
Adventures (1914), and The Counterfeiters (1926). Received the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1947. [Lavery]
|
|
Girl
in a Nightgown
|
“The
Girl in a Nightgown” (194), is the title of a poem that serves to
illustrate a world in conflict and anxiety, in which nights are no longer
periods of peaceful sleep. Only
with the lights out, as during an air raid, can the shades go up and one
is allowed “a look at the weather.”
The title character is not directly referred to in the body of the
poem, but she personalizes a feminine vulnerability of youth and undress
in the face of the circumstances of life, in this case, a world at war. [Haynes]
|
|
Glass Man,
The
|
The
glass man appears in Stevens' poem "Asides on the Oboe." He is a
figure for the "impossible possible philosophers' man." As such
he is not to be understood literally, but as the projection of an ideal
man, a "diamond globe" who "sums us up."
However, the new horrors of warfare (World War II) demanded a
higher commitment on the part of all people to internalize the ideals once
just figurative, so that finally "we . . . at last were one"
with the glass man "without
external reference."
[Haynes]
|
|
Golden
Woman in a Silver Mirror
|
with every-day reality" (Letters 643) in his
poem "Golden Woman in a Silver Mirror" (393-394). Stevens did
not have a particular person in mind when he named her "belle
Belle" in the poem (Letters 793). She is "Of the most
beautiful, the most beautiful maid / And mother" (394). Her
reflection in the mirror symbolizes that our lives are a reflection of our
reality. Images captured in poetry remain preserved and outlast all life
and reflections. [Regensburg]
|
|
Good Man, The
|
As
the subject of the poem, this
figure is described as having lived through generations, offering hope in
trying times. That this man
is put to death and is not understood by his contemporaries is indicative
of a searing social commentary on the part of the poet. [Rhodes]
|
|
Gott,
Herr
|
Character
in "Analysis of a Theme," presumably a humorous Germanic name
for the Christian God. [Lavery]
|
|
Great
Captain, The
|
In
“Paisant Chronicle” (293-94), the “great captain” (2) is a heroic
figure who exemplifies a brave and successful man.
His story is one of celebration:
In life, he is “Admired by men” (6) and, in death, he is
honored with “funeral pomps” (9).
Human history is a cycle of celebrations of such men.
These men are the opposite of the “major men” (1, 13), who
might be heroes also but who seem ordinary and are thus more accessible.
See “Major Man.”
In
“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction: It
Must Give Pleasure,” (346-47, IV) the “great captain” (6, 16)
constitutes half of a “mystic marriage in Catawba” (4).
This hero’s status [“high, / His puissant front” (11-12)]
contrasts with the maiden Bawda’s “subtle sound” (12); nevertheless,
they “married well” (19) because each represents for the other an
integral part of the setting (Catawba) that they both love:
She is the native “whom he found there” (17), and he is her
“sun” (18) in this warm coastal locale.
[Wright]
|
|
Hals,
Franz
|
(c.1580-1666).
Dutch painter known for his portraits and scenes from everyday life.
[Lavery]
|
|
Hand,
The
|
The
Hand is a strange fictional character in “The Hand as a Being” from
Parts of a World. The scene
seems to be a man painting a nude woman, but Stevens quickly makes it
something much more unusual. In
the third stanza, he writes, “Too conscious of too many things at once,
/ In the first canto of the final canticle, / Her hand composed him and
composed the tree” (242). Just
as the title of the poem implies, the hand of the “naked, nameless
dame” actually becomes its own being and is capable of creating and
interacting with the man of the poem.
Stevens goes on to write, “Her hand composed him like a hand
appeared, / Of an impersonal gesture, a stranger’s hand. / He was too
conscious of too many things / In the first canto of the final canticle. /
Her hand took his and drew him near to her” (242).
The story seems to be one of a trip into the world of the
imagination by the painter of this woman.
Finally, when we read “Her hair fell on him and the mi-bird flew
/ To the ruddier bushes at the garden’s end. / Of her, of her alone, at
last he knew” (242). This
seems to be a shocking of the artist back into reality by the touch of the
woman’s hair, but he knows now that he has traveled into the world of
reality and has grown from the experience. [Atkins]
|
|
Hans
Christian
|
Hans
Christian Andersen (1805-75) was a Danish writer of such famous fairy
tales as "The Little Match Girl," "The Ugly Duckling,"
"The Snow Queen," and "The Red Shoes." Alluded to in
“Sonatina to Hans Christian.” [Lavery]
|
|
Haydn,
Joseph
|
(1732-1809).
Prolific Austrian classical composer, author of such great works as the
oratorios The Creation (1798) and The Seasons (1801) .[Lavery]
|
|
Hidalgo
|
A
member of the lowest nobility of Spain.
In Stevens' Description Without Place (302), the hidalgo attempts
to "make" himself through the "mountainous character of his
speech," but his speech only reveals his "style of life." Stevens comments upon how dependent literate societies are
on words in establishing meaning. A
Thought Resolved (171) contains a hidalgo who is represented as the bronze
man (see entry) mostly concerning himself with convention. [Brigati]
|
|
High-Toned
Old Christian Woman, A
|
“A
High-Toned Old Christian Woman” (p.
47) is the title of a poem in which the title character is directly
addressed by an unidentified narrator, who argues against her adherence to
a closed system of belief. The
narrator recommends that she make room in her one-sided perceptions for a
“peristyle” that can open onto a parade of “jovial hullabaloo.”
Though this is apt to “make widows wince,” it is, after all,
part of the nature of “fictive things” to “[w]ink most when widows
wince.” [Haynes]
|
|
Hitler,
Adolf
|
(1889-1945).
German fascist dictator, author of Mein Kampf, founder of Nazism. His
territorial ambitions for a dreamed-of Third Reich provoked World War II,
and anti-Semitism led to the Holocaust, in which millions of European Jews
were slaughtered. Facing defeat by the Allies, he killed himself in 1945. [Lavery]
|
|
Hobbes,
Thomas
|
(1588-1679).
British materialist philosopher, author of Leviathan (1651), famous for
his analysis of man in the state of nature. [Lavery]
|
|
Homborg,
Mr.
|
The
poem Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly (CPP 439), is
presented by Stevens as one of Mr. Homburg's "irritating minor
ideas," thus discrediting the significance of the issue to come.
In his criticism of the poem, Sukenick suggests Homburg is a name
constructed to pun Hamburg-humbug, "Mr. Homburg's speculation has
been related to Emerson and the Transcendentalists by way of Concord, and
his name, suggesting such puns as Hamburg-humbug, to that movement's
German background" (189). [Brigati]
|
|
Horace
|
(Quintus
Horatius Flaccus, 65 B.C.-8 B.C.). Latin lyric poet. [Lavery]
|
|
Ignorant Man,
The
|
Appears
in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” as one who “chants by book [. .
.] hot for another accessible bliss” (342).
Likewise, the ignorant man appears in “Crude Foyer” where
“thought is false happiness” (270), and he is “incapable of least,
minor, vital metaphor” because he has fallen victim to reason.
In both instances the ignorant man is the man of reason.
On the other hand, the ignorant man of “The Sense of the
Sleight-of-Hand Man” appears to be ignorant in the conventional sense,
but this ignorance is positive because it is this ignorant man “alone,
[who] has any chance to mate his life with life that is sensual” (205).
In other words, he can move beyond reason and intellect and use his
imagination. [Crum]
|
|
Jack
and Jill
|
Jack
and Jill appear in stanza XXII of Stevens’ fifty-stanza poem, “Like
Decorations in a N. Cemetery” (p. 124).
The narrator bids the couple to, in effect, participate in the
actions of life that are natural to their condition, to dance their dance:
“Clog, therefore.” In
this section of the poem, the poet is reflecting on the nature of life as
it “derives/From truth and not from satire.” This is one of the
prerequisites of creating a new reality, as the poet character “Walt
Whitman” does in stanza I. [Haynes]
|
|
Jackson,
Andrew
|
(1767-1845).
Tennessee-born General (he defeated the British at the Battle of new
Orleans in the War of 1812) and president of the U.S. (1829-37). Alluded
to in “The Lack of Repose.” [Lavery]
|
|
James,
Henry
|
(1843-1916).
American (later a British citizen) novelist, one of the great masters of
the genre, author of such books as Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw,
The Ambassadors, Wings of the Dove, The Spoils of Poynton, The Golden
Bowl, Portrait of a Lady, The Aspern Papers. [Lavery]
|
|
James,
William
|
(1842-1910).
American psychologist and pragmatist philosopher, author of such books as
The Varieties of Religious Experience. [Lavery]
|
|
Jasmine
|
Jasmine
is a character only named in the title of her poem, “Jasmine’s
Beautiful Thoughts Underneath the Willow” (CP 62).
She dreams of love, admitting in the first stanza that her
“titillations have no foot-notes.”
She is a dreamer who sees love beyond her present situation; she
imagines her love as a “vivid apprehension…of bliss submerged beneath
appearance.” Therefore,
Jasmine hopes for a love that is blind to appearance, possibly because she
wishes she were more attractive. If
Jasmine isn’t beautiful, then at least she can think beautiful thoughts.
[O’Neal]
|
|
Joad,
C. E. M.
|
(1891-1953).
English rationalist philosopher professor at Birbeck College, Univ. of
London, a conscientious objector in World War I, a BBC radio personality,
and author of such books as Good and Evil (1943) and The Recovery of
Belief (1953). [Lavery]
|
|
Jove
(Jupiter)
|
Jove is the English name for Jupiter. In Roman mythology,
Jupiter is the supreme god of the universe. He is a god of sky and light,
and he protects the state and its laws. Jove appears in "An Ordinary
Evening in New Haven" in part XXIV: "In the genius of summer
that they blew up / The statue of Jove among the boomy clouds" (412).
When something new replaces the statue, it is an "escape from
repetition, a happening" (412). Thus the repetition of mythology
irritates Stevens, and Jove is destroyed and replaced with something new.
Jove also appears in "Sunday Morning," as Stevens outlines the
divine from the "inhuman" Jove to Christ (54). [Regensburg]
|
|
Joyce,
James
|
(1882-1941).
Expatriate Irish poet and novelist, one of the major writers in the
modernist tradition. Author of Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. [Lavery]
|
|
Kafka,
Franz
|
(1883-1924).
Austrian-Jewish author, a resident of Prague, author of The Trial, The
Castle, "Metamorphosis," and other works; one of the most
important writers of the modern age. [Lavery]
|
|
Kierkegaard,
Soren
|
(1813-1855).
Danish philosopher and theologian, the father of existentialism. In a
career of only twelve years, author of over twenty books (many written
under pseudonyms), including Either-Or, Fear and Trembling, The Concept of
Dread, Stages on Life's Way, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
[Lavery]
|
|
Konstantinov
|
[Lavery]
Esthétique
du Mal
|
|
Large
Red Man
|
This
is the figure described in "Large Red Man Reading."
Ronald Sukenick calls him the "mythic figure of a poet,"
explaining that his size and color speak to his vibrancy and vitality.
[Rhodes]
|
|
Latest
Freed Man, The
|
The
title character of a poem of the same name who awakes to a world purged of
"old descriptions," anxious, having "just/Escaped from the
truth," to become "a man without a doctrine," to transform
himself into an "ox" able to live in a world "more real,
himself/At the center of reality, seeing it." [Lavery]
|
|
Lecturer
on This Beautiful World of Ours, The
|
In
“The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract” (369-70), the “lecturer / On This
Beautiful World Of Ours” (2-3) is a scholar who feigns to possess
knowledge of the world. However,
he never actually provides “The particular answer to the particular
question” (5). He artfully “hems” and “haws,” answering questions
with more questions: “If
the day writhes, it is not with revelations. / One goes on asking
questions” (7-8). As a
result of the lecturer’s evasion, clarity is never achieved:
“It is not so blue as we thought.
To be blue, / There must be no questions” (10-11).
[Wright]
|
|
Lenin,
Vladimir
|
(1870-1924).
Russian Bolshevik revolutionary leader, a major figure in his nation's
1917 revolution and the founding of the USSR. Aluded to in “Description
Without Place.” [Lavery]
|
|
Leonidas
|
[Lavery]
|
|
Lewis,
C. Day
|
(1904-72).
English poet, author of detective fiction (under the pseudonym Nicholas
Blake), and translator, father of actor Daniel Day Lewis, and poet
laureate (1967-72). [Lavery]
|
|
Lewis,
H. D.
|
[Lavery]
|
|
Liadoff,
Anatole
|
[Lavery]
Two Tales of Liadoff
|
|
Lion, The
|
[Atkins]
|
|
Locke,
John
|
(1632-1704).
English empirical philosopher, author of Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). [Lavery]
|
|
Lyly,
John
|
(1554?-1606).
English writer, known for his plays and his proto-novel Euphues, whose
overwrought prose style came to be known as Euphuism. [Lavery]
|
|
Macabre
Mice, The
|
Statues
are generally revered in society as admirable representations of
antiquity. However, to
Stevens, statues are an unfavorable representation of static and
convention. In Dance of the
Macabre Mice (101), Stevens displays his dislike for statues in a
carnivalesque representation where, perhaps, the lowest form of scavenger
en masse overtakes, runs freely, hungrily and dances upon what was to be
considered a figure of greatness. [Brigati]
|
|
Madame
La Fleurie
|
[Lavery]
|
|
Major
Man
|
An
important concept in Stevens’s poetry, the major man appears most
prominently in “Paisant Chronicle.”
The major men, Stevens says, “are characters beyond reality
composed thereof” (CPP 294). The
major man is a sort of hero but “more than the casual hero” (294).
He is a hero who appears ordinary: “he may be seated in a cafe.
There may be a dish of country cheese and a pineapple on the
table” (294). Stevens
explains why the major man must be ordinary in a letter to Jose Rodriguez
Feo: “a hero won’t do, but we like him much better when he doesn’t
look it and, of course, it is only when he doesn’t look it that we can
believe in him” (LWS 489). [Crum]
|
|
Mallarmé,
Stephan
|
(1842-98).
French symbolist poet, author of Herodias (1869) and The Afternoon of a
Faun (1876). [Lavery]
|
|
Man
Whose Pharynx Was Bad
|
“The
Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad” is the title of poem (p. 81) in which Stevens
describes the speaker (as poet) in depression over the inability to break
out into a fresh articulation of experience.
The daily “routine” has produced a “malady of quotidian.”
Like a speaker unable to talk as a result of a sore throat, the
narrator has no active solution for the artistic impasse, except to lamely
hope that the season will somehow change and one can again be “spouting
new orations.” [Haynes]
|
|
Man
with the Blue Guitar, The
|
The
man with the blue guitar appears in his self-titled poem and is
Stevens’s representation of the poet, or any man of imagination (135).
The color blue is generally representational of imagination, and
the man who plays this blur guitar attempts to, as Sukenick points out,
“produce a version of man’s reality through imaginative
constructions” (84). In
this poem, the spectators prompt the man with the blue guitar: “But
play, you must, a tune beyond us yet ourselves, a tune upon the blur
guitar of things exactly as they are.”
The poet, as the guitarist, must eventually come close to achieving
this delicate balance. [O’Neal]
|
|
March,
Hugh
|
A
character in "Variations on a Summer Day," a "a sergeant, a
redcoat, killed,/With his men, beyond the barican." [Lavery]
|
|
Marchand
|
Jean Hippolyte Marchand (1883-1941) was a painter,
lithographer, and illustrator. He illustrated books for Valèry, Claudel,
and Jammes (Sukenick 105). Stevens references Marchand in
"Connoisseur of Chaos": "As pleasant as the brush-strokes
of a bough, / An upper, particular bough in, say, Marchand" (195). [Regensburg]
|
|
Maritain,
Jacques
|
(1882-1973).
French Catholic Neo-Thomist philosopher, author of numerous books
including The Dream of Descartes 1932) and Creative Intuition in Art and
Poetry (1953). [Lavery]
|
|
Mather,
Cotton
|
(1663-1728)
Pastor of North Church, Boston, whose writings helped to make possible the
1692 Salem witch trials. Alluded to in “The Blue Buildings in the Summer
Air.” [Lavery]
|
|
Mauron,
Charles
|
[Lavery]
|
|
McCreevy,
Tom
|
[Lavery]
|
|
MacCullough
|
Found
in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," under the topic "It
Must Be Abstract," Section Eight, MacCullough is the image of the
average American or what Sukenick, calls "the democratic ideal of
man." It is proposed
that a MacCullough might become a "major man:" the
"philosopher-poet," explains Sukenick, who would "grow in
understanding and speak flowingly and with ease."
This man [Rhodes]
|
|
Mechanical
Optimist, The
|
The
title character of the first part of "A Thought Revolved." [Lavery]
|
|
Men in
Black Space
|
Found
in "Metaphor as Degeneration," this figure hearkens back to the
"Philosopher Reading By His Own Light." He casts his mind to the dark, metaphysical realm where,
Stevens would say, he finds no answers and "descends unchanged."
[Rhodes]
|
|
Man White
as Marble
|
This
figure appears in "Metaphor as Degeneration."
He is one of those Stevens' characters who does not change and is
resistant to the imagination. He
is described as sitting "in a wood" contemplating death. [Rhodes]
|
|
Michelangelo
|
(Michelangelo
Buonarroti, 1475-1564). Italian sculptor, painter, poet, one of the titans
of the Renissance, best known for his work on the Sistine Chapel at the
Vatican. [Lavery]
|
|
Mills,
Clark
|
Nineteenth
century American sculptor and architect, whose statue of Andrew Jackson
stands in Lafayette Park across from the White House in Washington, DC. [Lavery]
|
|
Milton,
John
|
(1608-74).
Major British poet, most famous for the epic Paradise Lost (1667). [Lavery]
|
|
Moliere,
Jean Baptiste
|
(1622-73).
French playwright and actor, author of Tartuffe (1664), Le Misanthrope
(1666), The Miser (1668); The Would-be Gentleman (1670); The Learned Women
(1672); The Imaginary Invalid (1673). Alluded to in “Paisant
Chronicle” [Lavery]
|
|
Mon
Oncle
|
“Mon
Oncle” literally translated means “My Uncle.”
Reminiscent of Pierrot, a stock comic character in the French
pantomime tradition, Mon Oncle provides the point of view for “Le
Monocle de Mon Oncle” (CPP 10-14).
For Stevens, “Mon Oncle” was “simply a man fairly well along
in life, looking back and talking in a more or less personal way about
life” (LWS 251). [Wright]
|
|
Monster, The
|
The
Monster is a figure that appears in Section 19 of the long Stevens poem
“The Man with the Blue Guitar.” Stevens
writes, “That I may reduce the monster to / Myself, and then may be
myself / In face of the monster, be more than part / Of it […] not be /
Alone, but reduce the monster and
be, / Two things, the two together as one, / And play of the monster and
of myself” (143). For
Stevens, the Monster seems to be reality and the pressures of reality that
constantly exert their forces on all of us.
In this section of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” Stevens
contemplates (and in fact decides in favor of) internalizing reality, or
the Monster, in order to alleviate these pressures and, in doing so, he
hopes to rewrite reality in his own words or poetry. [Atkins]
|
|
Moore,
Marianne
|
(1887-1972).
American poet whose Collected Poems (1951) won the Pulitzer Prize. [Lavery]
|
|
Mrs.
Alfred Uruguay
|
Mrs.
Alfred appears in one of Stevens’s fictitious character sketch poems,
“Mrs. Alfred Uruguay” (225). Mrs.
Alfred feels a tremendous sense of dissatisfaction with her life and
decides to leave her husband in the middle of the night.
She escapes on a donkey, and at the same time, emphasizes several
problematic themes for Stevens such as the moon and traveling up the hill
instead of down the hill into the real.
Mrs. Alfred’s attempt to validate herself fails as she arrives at
the top of the hill with nowhere to go but back down, having made no
progress. Stevens also calls attention to her incapability by having
a capable man, his Noble Rider, fly past Mrs. Alfred to the real which
exists in the town she foolishly attempts to escape. [O’Neal]
|
|
Mrs.
Anderson
|
In
“The Pleasures of Merely Circulating,” the speaker remarks that
“Mrs. Anderson’s Swedish baby might as well have been German or
Spanish” (CPP 120). Perhaps
one form of circulating in the poem is being born.
[Crum]
|
|
Mrs.
Pappadopolous
|
Mrs.
Pappadopoulos is the very unusual name of the model in “So-and-So
Reclining on Her Couch” (CP 262). The
poem tells the story of an artist painting his nude subject in several
different positions, or sketches. Mrs.
P is the title character, So-and-So, and receives some validation as a
human being instead of a subject when the artist uses her full name. [O’Neal]
|
|
Naaman
|
Naaman
is a Biblical character from 2 Kings, and he was affected with leprosy.
He heard of a prophet in Samaria who could cure him, and went to
him. He was cured of his
leprosy by dipping himself seven times in the Jordan River.
In “Certain Phenomena of Sound,” Stevens’s Naaman is a
servant who is ordered to “slice the mango” because the Redwood Roamer
has returned, and everyone in the story of this poem wants to her the
Roamer’s story of his travels (255). [O’Neal]
|
|
Narcissus
|
Narcissus,
according to Greek mythology, is a beautiful, young man who fell in love
with his own image in a pool of water and was transformed into a flower
that bears his name. In Stevens' "Jumbo," he generalizes the
imaginative ego: "Ancestor of Narcissus, prince / Of the secondary
men." (241). [Regensburg]
|
|
Natives
of the Rain
|
These
figures appear in Steven's narrative poem "The Comedian as the Letter
C" under the heading "The Idea of a Colony" in Section
Four. They are part of the
indigenous world Crispin describes through references to nature: "The
natives of the rain are rainy men." [Rhodes]
|
|
Necessary
Angel, The
|
In
"Angel Surrounded by Paysans," the "angel of reality"
in whose "sight, you see the earth again." Stevens' collected
essays "on reality and the imagination" (published in 1951) drew
its name from the same poem. [Lavery]
|
|
Nepo,
Cornelius
|
[Lavery]
The Man on the Dump
|
|
Neruda,
Pablo
|
(1904-73).
Chilean poet and diplomat, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1971. Alluded to in
“Description Without Place” [Lavery]
|
|
Nietzsche,
Friedrich
|
(1844-1900).
Controversial German classical philologist and philosopher, author of The
Birth of Tragedy (1872), The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra
(1883), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and The Will to Power (1888). Spent
the last eleven years of his life in a mental hospital. Alluded to in
“Description Without Place.” [Lavery]
|
|
Noble Rider,
The
|
The
“noble rider” is the developing young poet in “The Noble Rider and
the Sound of Words” (643-665), an essay originally published in The
Necessary Angel (1951). The
masculine, heroic poet (“noble rider”) uses the only means available
to him (words) to articulate reality in works of the imagination (poetry).
See also “The Figure of the Youth.” [Wright]
|
|
Nomad
Exquisite
|
The
Nomad Exquisite is the speaker of the poem “Nomad Exquisite” from
Harmonium, and, in some ways, he can be read as an autobiographical
character. Stevens was quite fond of visiting Florida (especially Key
West), and, because of his work, he was a bit of a nomad himself,
travelling quite extensively within the United States.
In “Nomad Exquisite,” the speaker states that just “As the
immense dew of Florida / Brings forth / The big-finned palm” or
“Brings forth hymn and hymn / From the beholder,” “So, in me, come
flinging / Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames” (77).
This seems to imply some sort of connection between the speaker and
Florida, a connection which was definitely present in Stevens’s life and
in his poetry. [Atkins]
|
|
Nunzio,
Nanzia
|
The
bride who is introduced in the eighth canto of Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction (CPP 329), confronts Ozymandias, a figure of Shelley who here
represents poetic ambition and the quest for the quintessential poem.
As a figure of the bride, Nanzia Nunzio asks to be given to such
creative truth. Such truth,
however, is impossible according to Stevens as he states "A fictive
covering/ Weaves always," thus, absolutes are far from possibility. [Brigati]
|
|
Old
John Zeller
|
[Lavery]
|
|
Old
Man Asleep
|
In
“An Old Man Asleep” the poet muses that the two worlds (the self and
the earth) are sleeping. The
paring of seemingly unrelated images “your beliefs and disbeliefs”
with the “redness of your reddish chestnut trees” (CPP 427)
seem to be an attempt to mirror what happens when a person dreams—when
the “two worlds” are asleep. [Crum]
|
|
Old
Woman & the Statue, The
|
“The
Old Woman and the Statue” forms part I of a long poem of Stevens, titled
“Owl’s Clover” (p. 152 ff). It
describes a woman destitute, the financial condition figuring for her
total refusal of the imagination. As
a result, her union with the elements of the natural world and the
artifacts of humanity is completely unconscious and without meaning for
her. “She was the tortured
one/ So destitute that nothing but herself/ Remained. . .” This element
of complete negation is unplanned for and without outside remedy.
She conceives of no possibility for transformation, no movement:
“looking at the place in which. . . each thing was motionless. . .”
Only after she departs can space and time again take on the
trappings of life, “Without her, evening, like a budding yew/ Would soon
be brilliant. . . .” [Haynes]
|
|
Omega
|
Omega
is the ending of a series or sequence.
Its common use is in “The Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and
the end,” etc. Stevens uses
this term in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” by saying “Reality
is the beginning not the end, Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega.”
Hierophant means “one who teaches the mysteries and duties of
religion,” and while Stevens means that Omega is the teacher of
religion, he says that reality is the beginning and Omega is the end. [O’Neal]
|
|
One of
Fictive Music, The
|
According
to his poem "To the One of Fictive Music," the One of Fictive
Music is a "Sister and mother and diviner love," (70). She is
the muse who inspires fictive music and poetry; she is the imagination. By
describing her as pale, "On your pale head wear / A band entwining,
set with fatal stones," Stevens states that people ignore the
imagination. He urges her presence in poetry: "Unreal, give back to
us what once you gave: / The imagination that we spurned and crave"
(71). [Regensburg]
|
|
Oriole
|
[Lavery]
Like Decorations
|
|
Owl
in the Sarcophagus, The
|
[Lavery]
|
|
Ox,
The
|
Oxen
are large, bovid mammals that grow up to five feet tall and can weigh over
2000 lbs. Because of its
tremendous size, the ox in “The Latest Freed Man” (187) effectively
symbolizes strength, physical sensation, and an overwhelming consciousness
of reality as experienced by the “freed man.”
[Wright]
|
|
Ozymandias
|
Ozymandias
is the Greek name for Ramses II, the Pharaoh of Egypt in the thirteenth
century BC. Ozymandias
appears in the eighth section of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” from
Transport to Summer. Although
this may be an allusion to the more well-known reference to Ozymandias in
the Shelley poem “Ozymandias,” in which Ramses is presented as a cruel
conqueror, Stevens paints Ozymandias in a much different light.
This poem relates the story of a new bride coming to Ozymandias and
is one of the most sensual scenes in all
of Stevens’ poetry. In
the closing lines of the poem, Ozymandias says to his new bride, who has
stripped herself “more nakedly than naked,” “the bride / Is never
naked. A fictive covering / Weaves always glistening from the
heart and mind” (342). This
sensitive decree is obviously a far cry from the Ozymandias of Shelley,
who cries, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and Despair!” [Atkins]
|
|
Papini
|
(Giovanni
Papini, 1881-1956), poet, novelist, journalist and polemical critic.
His avant-garde polemics caused him to be recognized as a
controversial Italian literary figure in the early and mid 20th
century. Like Stevens, Papini
normally favored breaking from conventional forms, but he often was noted
to be contradictory in his ideological development. In Reply to Papini,
Stevens notes that Papini posits poets should sing hymns of victory or
psalms of supplication rather than aspire to "cerebral
phosphorescences" (382). Stevens
disagrees in his reply by suggesting that great figures of history and
myth should have the ability to speak for themselves, and the poet should
instead concern himself with the growth of the mind and observations of
the present. [Brigati]
|
|
Pareto
|
[Lavery]
|
|
Pascal,
Blaise
|
(1623-1662).
French philosopher and mathematician, author of Penssee, in which he
contemplated the implication of the new Copernican conception of the
universe. [Lavery]
|
|
Pastor
Caballero, The
|
While
the most common meaning of caballero is a knight or cavalier, it can also
mean a horseman. Likewise,
herdsman is a more obscure meaning of pastor than the traditional
religious connotation the title holds.
Therefore, the religious cavalier is demoted to become the
herdsman/horseman. What’s
more, the speaker focuses almost entirely on the hat of the pastor
caballero. In fact, details
about his hat are all we really learn of the figure. [Crum]
|
|
Pastoral
Nun, A
|
This
character is the title of a poem and the object of derision by the
speaker. She sermonizes that "poetry and apotheosis are one,"
and for the improvement of her audience she also provides two
illustrations, both of which reveal her opinions to be very narrow. Though
her first illustration is related in full, the second is just summarized,
perhaps because the speaker is so turned off. [Haynes]
|
|
Pater,
Walter
|
(1839-94).
British essayist and critic, author of Studies in the History of the
Renaissance (1873), Marius the Epicurean (1885), Imaginary Portraits
(1887), and other works influential on fin de siecle British aestheticism
and decadence. [Lavery]
|
|
Paulhan,
Jean
|
Co-founder,
with Henry Church, of the French little magazie Measures. [Lavery]
|
|
Penelope
|
She
was the wife of Odysseus and a symbol of devotion and fidelity. She waited
nineteen years for her husband to come home while Odysseus fought in the
Trojan War. During that time,
Penelope resisted numerous suitors, finally tricking them by saying she
would choose a suitor when she had finished weaving her funeral garment. Each day she would weave, and each night she would undo
what she had done that day, thus Penelope never finished her task and held
the suitors off until her husband’s return.
“The World as Meditation” (441) is told from Penelope’s point
of view, and during her almost endless waiting, Stevens beautifully
captures the emotions she may have felt, for example, preparing what she
will say when he arrives, and even mistaking the approaching daylight for
her Odysseus, “Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so
near.” [O’Neal]
|
|
Pensive Man,
The
|
Appearing in the final section of "Connoisseur of
Chaos," the pensive man "sees that eagle float / For which the
intricate Alps are a single nest" (195). The definition of pensive is
deeply, often wistfully or dreamily thoughtful. It can also mean
suggestive or expressive of melancholy thoughtfulness. The pensive man is
the one who gives thought to the chaos of reality to achieve order and
unity. [Regensburg]
|
|
Peter
Quince
|
This
figure is the speaker in "Peter Quince at the Clavier."
As Stevens states in his letters, this character is drawn from a
figure of the same name found in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's
Dream. Ronald Sukenick
points out that just as Shakespeare's Quince directs a play, Stevens'
Quince musically "directs the imagination." [Rhodes]
|
|
Peter
the Voyant
|
[Lavery]
Questions are Remarks
|
|
Phoebus
|
Phoebus,
also known as Apollo, is the Greek god of music, prophecy, medicine,
poetry, and archery, but he is most widely known as the sun-god or the god
of light. In poetry, Phoebus
traditionally represents the sun. The
ancient Greeks personified and worshipped the sun as the god Phoebus, but
the speaker in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (CPP 329-30) rejects
this mythology and the idea that the sun can be named at all: “Phoebus
is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus
was / A name for something that never could be named” (I, 16-17).
On the contrary, the sun simply is:
“The sun / Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be / In the
difficulty of what it is to be” (I, 19-21).
Instead of accepting old beliefs, the young man “must become an
ignorant man again / And see the sun again with an ignorant eye / And see
it clearly in the idea of it” (I, 4-6).
By clearing his mind of prior perceptions, including even the most
basic ideas like the sun, the man can experience the true reality of the
world. [Wright]
|
|
Phœbus
Apothicaire
|
[Atkins]
|
|
Phœbus
the Tailor
|
One
of many names referring to the mythological Apollo, among many other
representations, god of poetry. For
Stevens, in New England Verses (CPP 88), Apollo represents convention and
the idealized figures of whom statues are made.
In essence Apollo represents a dated methodology from which Stevens
prefers to progress.
[Brigati]
|
|
Phosphor
|
Phosphor
is the subject of “Phosphor Reading by His Own Light” from Parts of a
World. The opening of the
poem tells us that “It is difficult to read.
The page is dark. / Yet he knows what it is that he expects”
(240). We may take
“reading” as a metaphor for perceiving and interpreting the world.
Stevens seems to be saying that, for Phosphor, what the world
actually is matters very little because he is completely influenced by his
lingering notions of the “old fictions.”
The second half of the poem addresses Phosphor and calls him a
“realist,” which seems to be a pejorative title.
The presence of the color green, a color Stevens seems to associate
with the imagination, implies that Stevens is imploring Phosphor to
abandon his beliefs in the “old fictions” so that he may begin to
create his own “new fictions.” [Atkins]
|
|
Picasso,
Pablo
|
(1881-1973).
Virtuoso Spanish painter and sculptor, one of the most important figures
of 20th century art. A major contributor to the development of cubism, he
is most famous for paintings such as The Old Guitarist, Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon, and Guernica. Alluded to in “The Man with the
Blue Guitar.” [Lavery]
|
|
Pigeons
|
Pigeons
appear in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” along with doves, cocks,
sparrows, and owls. A blue
pigeon and a white pigeon appear in “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” and
there are gray pigeons in “Gray Stones and Gray Pigeons.”
However, the most memorable appearance of pigeons in Stevens’s
poetry occurs in the closing lines of “Sunday Morning” when “casual
flocks of pigeons make ambiguous undulations as they sink, downward to
darkness, on extended wings” (CPP 56). [Crum]
|
|
Piranesi
|
(1720-78).
Italian engraver and architect., best known for his fantastic depictions
of elaborate, maze-like prisons. [Lavery]
|
|
Plato
|
Plato
was a figure of ancient Greek philosophy, whose thought postulated
"ideal forms" from which all physical manifestations of specific
forms are only approximations. In Stevens' poem "Homunculus et la
Belle Etoile," he appears as a caricature of his own school of
thought, as in "the ultimate Plato," "tranquillizing"
weak-minded persons. Rather than to "think hard," such persons
are content to "bathe their hearts in later moonlight." [Haynes]
|
|
Platonic
Person, A
|
Stevens
says of the Platonic Person: “He was a Jew from Europe or might have
been” in “The Pure Good of Theory” (289).
However, the Platonic Person is much more than that.
The person is Platonic in the sense that he is free from physical
desire and romantic love. This
quality frees him to experience the solitude of “what people had been
and still were.” Basically,
the Platonic Person is allowed to experience the old fictions and the new
fictions which humans create without the burden of emotion.
Sukenick elaborates on this notion when he says that this poem is
about “the efforts of the ego, through the imagination, to contact
reality, its ‘element.’” The Platonic Person returns to the baseness
of human experience and imagination. [O’Neal]
|
|
Polish
Aunt, A
|
A Polish Aunt "knew all the legends of Paradise and
all the stories of Poland" (996). She has a conversation with her
nephew in "Colloquy with a Polish Aunt" (68) in which she
informs him, "Imagination is the will of things. . . .";
therefore, he dreams of women, "swathed in indigo" (68). [Regensburg]
|
|
Polodowsky
|
This
figure is found in "O, Florida, Venereal Soil," an early poem in
the Harmonium collection. Polodowsky
is a Cuban who is described as one of the "dreadful sundry of this
world." [Rhodes]
|
|
Poussin,
Nicolas
|
(1594-1665).
French painter who set the standard for French classical art. [Lavery]
|
|
President,
The
|
[Lavery]
|
|
Professor
Eucalyptus
|
“Professor
Eucalyptus” in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (397-417)
represents the lack of imagination because he cannot see beyond reality
(his immediate environment). He
has “an eye that does not look / Beyond the object” (XIV, 3-4). His philosopher’s point of view is the opposite of the
poet’s: “It is the
philosopher’s search / For an interior made exterior / And the poet’s
search for the same exterior made / Interior” (XXII, 3-6). [Wright]
|
|
Proust,
Marcel
|
(1871-1922).
French writer, author of the multi-volume novel À
la recherche du temps perdu. [Lavery]
|
|
Queen
of Fact, The
|
[Atkins]
|
|
Rabbi, The
|
Appears
in Things of August (CPP 336). Stevens
presents his sentiments toward the Rabbi in is letters (LWS 871),
"The rabbi is a rhetorical rabbi.
Frankly, the figure of the rabbi has always been an exceedingly
attractive one to me because it is the figure of a man devoted in the
extreme to scholarship and at the same time to making some use of it for
human purposes." [Brigati]
|
|
Rabelais
|
(1490-1553).
A member of the Benedictine Catholic order, who published Gargantua and
Pantagruel, a fantastic satire concerning the adventures of father and son
giants, over a thirty year period. [Lavery]
|
|
Racine,
Jean Baptiste
|
(1639-99).
French neo-classical dramatist, author of such plays as Andromaque (1667),
Iphigénie en Aulide (1674), and Phèdre (1677). [Lavery]
|
|
Ransom,
John Crowe
|
(1888-1974).
American poet and critic, professor at Vanderbilt University and Kenyon
College, founder of the journals The Fugitive and The Kenyon Review, and
one of the key figures in the development of the New Criticism. [Lavery]
|
|
Redwood
Roamer
|
Appears
in “Certain Phenomena of Sound.”
The speaker of the poem welcomes Redwood home to a lazy summer
scene with a feast and prepares to listen to his tale.
Apparently the Roamer’s tale is a tall one: “the Roamer is a
voice taller than the redwoods, engaged in a most prolific narrative, a
sound producing the things that are spoken” (256). [Crum]
|
|
Revolutionists,
The
|
[Lavery]
|
|
Richards,
I. A.
|
(1893-1979).
British critic and poet, author of The Meaning of Meaning (with C. K.
Ogden), Science and Poetry (1926), Practical Criticism (1929), and other
works. [Lavery]
|
|
Richter,
Ludwig
|
(1803-1884).
German author
|
|
Rimbaud,
Arthur
|
(1854-91).
Visionary, hallucinogenic French symbolist poet, author of such works as
The Drunken Boat; Illuminations, and Season in Hell. He stopped
writing when he was 19. [Lavery]
|
|
Rochester,
Lord
|
[Lavery]
|
|
Rodriguez-Feo,
José
|
[Lavery]
A Word with José-Rodriquez-Feo
|
|
Rosenbloom
|
Rosenbloom
is a character who has passed away in “Cortege for Rosenbloom” (63).
A cortege is a funeral procession, and this one is his.
The poet deals with death very matter-of-factly in this poem as he
describes carrying Rosenbloom’s body to the gravesite.
“Rosenbloom is dead” echoes throughout the poem, yet Stevens
(nor his cortege) show none of the emotion of funerals. Instead, Stevens focuses only on the ceremony of death and
burial. In his Letters,
Stevens mentions that he finds the ceremonies of death amusing, and this
poem certainly reflects that mindset. [O’Neal]
|
|
Ruler
of Reality, The
|
[Regensburg]
|
|
Russell,
Bertrand
|
(1872-1970).
British analytical philosopher and mathematician, winner of the 1950 Nobel
Prize for Literature. [Lavery]
|
|
Santayana,
George
|
(1863-1952).
Spanish-born, American philosopher, and writer, and professor at Harvard,
where Stevens was his student. Author of such books as The Sense of Beauty
(1896) and The Last Puritan, a novel (1935). [Lavery]
|
|
Satan
|
[Rhodes]
Esthétique
du Mal
|
|
Schlegel,
Friedrich
|
(1772-1829).
German Romantic man of letters and critic. [Lavery]
|
|
Scholar, The
|
The
scholar in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” is one whose intense hunger
for knowledge is like a hawk hunting its prey.
The scholar seizes life, with joy, as the hawk seizes its prey
(XXIV, CPP 145-46). [Wright]
|
|
Secretary
for Porcelain
|
The
Secretary for Porcelain appears in the second section of “Extracts from
Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas.”
Prior to introducing the Secretary for Porcelain,
Stevens states that “The eye believes and its communion takes. / The
spirit laughs to see the eye believe / And its communion take” (II.
1-3).
In other
words, people believe in and become a part of the world that they see, but
the souls of people know this to be a false belief and a false communion.
The
Secretary of Porcelain, for Stevens, is one of these people, but Stevens
immediately points out the misconceptions of the Secretary for Porcelain.
He writes,
“Let the Secretary of Porcelain observe / That evil made magic, as in
catastrophe, / If neatly glazed, becomes the same as the fruit / Of an
emperor, the egg-plant of a prince” (II. 4-7).
Stevens
shows that evil may be “glazed” or wrapped in many guises and, when it
is presented in these ways, it may be “seen” as the very sustenance of
life for even the noblest of people.
Through the example of the Secretary of Porcelain,
Stevens shows the ambiguity of the world perceived through sight and the
dangers inherent in those perceptions.
[Atkins]
|
|
Semiramide
|
Character
in an opera of the same name composed by Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868).
In Semiramide, Semiramide, the Queen of Babylon kills her husband, King
Nino, with the assistance of Assur. A
power struggle ensues to decide who will become the successor to King.
Assure becomes disappointed when Arsace is chosen by Semiramide.
Later, Arsace is found to be King Nino's son and Assur murders
Semiramide, after which Arsace becomes the official monarch.
In Certain Phenomena of Sound, (255), Stevens draws attention to
how a writer like Rossini uses phonetics in creating names to give
readers, or listeners, a feeling for the personality of the character.
In the poem, Stevens contrasts the "dark-syllabled"
Semiramide with the white, light of Eulalia (St. Eulalia of Barcelona). [Brigati]
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Serge,
Victor
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(1890-1947).
Belgian-born Russian-Polish socialist, an opponent of Stalinist oppression
in the Soviet Union, and author of such books as From Lenin to Stalin
(1937), Destiny of a Revolution (1937), several novels, and a volume of
poetry. Alluded to in “Esthétique
du Mal.” [Lavery]
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Shakespeare
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[Lavery]
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Shelley,
Percy Bysshe
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(1792-1822).
Major English Romantic poet, author of such works as Prometheus Unbound
(1820). [Lavery]
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Silent
Man, A
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[Lavery]
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Silver
Plough-Boy, The
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In
“The Silver Plough-Boy,” a mysterious “black figure dances in a
black field” (CPP 42). The
figure wraps itself in a white sheet and becomes a silver figure,
continuing to dance through field until the sheet slips free and settles
softly on the ground. The speaker refers to the figure as “it” throughout the
poem, and we know almost nothing about the silver plough-boy. [Crum]
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Sleight-of-Hand
Man, The
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This
character is found in the poem "The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand
Man." A sleight-of-hand man is a magician. He is descriptive of the
great varieties of minute experience, the things that come as a surprise,
such as a bluejay suddenly swooping down, the exquisite "life/That is
the sensual, pearly spouse." Unlike the ignorant man, alone, his
disciplined sense is finely attuned. He has become adept. [Haynes]
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So-and-So
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This
character appears in “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch” (CP 262).
This funny poem is an artist painting a woman (presumably nude) who
has come to model for him. Stevens
mentions Projections A, B, and C in terms of So-and-So, and the model has
no identity as she has no name. She
is only a subject, meant to be drawn; she is three-dimensional being
painted into two dimensions. This
poem is an exploration of the artistic process, and So-and-So is merely
the model. At the end of the
poem, the artist thanks her for modeling, and he finally calls her by her
real name, Mrs. Pappadopoulos. [O’Neal]
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Soldier, The
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[Regensburg]
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Solitaires,
the
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Found
in the poem "The Place of the Solitaires," these are individuals
who see the "cyclic processes of reality" according to Ronald
Sukenick. They meditate in
isolation, witnessing the ceaseless repetition in the rhythms of nature. [Rhodes]
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Spenser,
Edmund
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(1552-99).
English Renaissance poet, author of The Faerie Queene. [Lavery]
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St.
John
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[Lavery]
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Stein,
Leo
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[Lavery]
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Susanna
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In
the parable of Susanna and the Elders found in the Apocrypha, Susanna
rebuffs the lustful advances of two aged judges, who then accuse her of
committing adultery with a young man.
She is condemned to death until cross-examination of the two false
witnesses yields conflicting accounts of the incident, and her life is
spared. In “Peter Quince at
the Clavier,” the speaker feels desire toward a woman in a painting,
which he equates to that of the elders when they first espied Susanna
bathing (72). [Wright]
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Swenson
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Swenson
is the fictional character to whom “Lions in Sweden” is addressed. The speaker tells Swenson that “the whole of the soul,
Swenson, / As every man in Sweden will concede / Still hankers after
lions, or, to shift, / Still hankers after sovereign images” (13-16).
These “lions” or “sovereign images” appear to be what
Stevens would call “the old fictions,” i.e., the Judeo-Christian God,
the gods of ancient mythology, etc. Even
though Stevens refuses to accept these “old fictions,” he realizes
that it is the very nature of the soul to find something with which to
fill this desire, and, for Stevens, that something is poetry. [Atkins]
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Tal
Coat, Pierre
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(1905-1985).
Born Pierre Louis Jacob. He was born in Brittany, a fisherman's son, and
came to Paris in 1924. He chose the surname Tal-Coat (Breton for
"Wood Face") to avoid being confused with the artist and poet
Max Jacob. Tal-Coat was one of the most important figures in the post-war
School of Paris. One of the founders in the mid-forties of Tachisme, a
lyrical abstract movement that was the French version of Abstract
Expressionism, his paintings were acclaimed and admired by fellow artists
such as Andre Masson. [Lavery]
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Tartuffe
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A
comedy by Moliere (1622-73) where the character Tartuffe, a hypocrite,
feigns pity to gain access to the home of Orgon, and later attempts to
seduce his wife. After his
motives were discovered and he was cast out, Tartuffe turns malicious
toward the family. In
Stevens' Paisant Chronicle, Tartuffe's myth is listed among a short
catalog of those represented as less than his idea of the "major
man," one beyond reality, yet composed thereof. (294) [Brigati]
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Thin
Men of Haddam
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[Lavery]
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Thomson,
James
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[Lavery]
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Töpfer
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Rodolphe
Topffer (1799-1864) was the son of a German painter who grew up in
Switzerland. Due to eye
trouble, he was unable to follow a career in the visual arts early in his
life, so he turned to writing instead.
He is best known for his “histoires en images,” picture stories
which are similar to comic strips. Stevens
possessed a collection of letters from the French writer de Maistre to
Topffer. Stevens was
apparently very fond of Topffer’s work, commenting in one of his letters
“how pleasant it would be to spend the winter on a farm and spend the
time reading Topffer” (LWS 653). [Crum]
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Triton
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Triton
is the name for the god of the ocean in ancient Roman mythology. He
appears in section I of Stevens' poem, The "Comedian as the letter
C," when the voyager Crispin is on his oceanic journey to the
Yucatan, little dreaming that the trip won't be the "simple
jaunt" he expected. In the poem, Triton is described as belonging to
a time long past. There is little left to remind one of Triton's
influence, "Except in faint memorial gesturings." [Haynes]
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Ultimate
Politician, The
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[O’Neal]
Sketch of the Ultimate Politician
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Ulysses
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[Regensburg]
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United
Dames of America
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This
is the title of a poem found in Parts of a World.
According to Ronald Sukenick, they are the "aristocratic ideas
of the singular man" that opposes the ideas of "the
masses." [Rhodes]
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Ursula
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[Lavery]
Cy Est Poiurtraicte, Made St. Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges
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Valery,
Paul
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(1871-1945).
French poet, critic, and philosopher, one of the most important literary
figures of the first half of the Twentieth Century [Lavery]
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Van
Gogh, Vincent
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(1853-90).
Tormented, brilliant "expressionist" Dutch painter, later a
resident of France. He sold only one painting in his lifetime and
committed suicide. [Lavery]
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Verrocchio
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[Lavery]
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Vidal,
Anatole
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[Lavery]
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Villon,
Jacques
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(1875-1963).
French cubist painter; brother of Marcel Duchamp. [Lavery]
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Vincentine
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“Vincentine”
is the name given to the sculpture of the nude by the speaker in “The
Apostrophe to Vincentine” (CPP 42-43).
Through the speaker’s imagination, the sculpture, Vincentine,
becomes more life-like, progressively gaining a name, warmth, color,
movement, a voice, and feelings. [Wright]
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Viollet-le-Duc
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Viollet-le-Duc
(1814-1879) was a French architect most famous for his restoration
projects. These restorations
included Notre Dame, Vezelay Abbey, and Pierrefonds Castle, all in France.
Viollet-le-Duc, although himself concerned mostly with Gothic
architecture, is considered a great influence on many Art Nouveau
architects beginning in the early 1890’s. Stevens refers to Viollet-le-Duc in the eighth section of
“Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction”: “Can we compose a
castle-fortress-home, / Even with the help of Viollet-le-Duc, / And set
the MacCullough there as major man?” (334).
Obviously, Stevens was well aware of Viollet-le-Duc’s facility
with the construction and restoration of castles and here uses that
knowledge to show that a castle, even one built by such a great architect,
would not hold the major man. [Atkins]
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Virgil
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(70-19
B. C.). Publius Vergilius Maro The greatest Roman poets; author of The
Eclogues or Bucolics (37 B.C.) and his national epic the Aeneid, which
tells the story of the fall of Troy and the founding of Rome. Alluded to
in “A Thought Revolved, Paisant Chronicle.” [Lavery]
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Virgin
Carrying a Lantern
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In
“Virgin Carrying a Lantern” (CPP 56), the image of the piousness of
the virgin exists only as a construct
of the imagination of the "negress" who "supposes
things false and wrong." [Brigati]
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Vocalissimus
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[Lavery]
To the Roaring Wind
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Voragine
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Jacobus
de Voragine was a thirteenth-century hagiographer famous for his Legenda
aurea (The Golden Legend), a compilation of saints' lives. From 1470
to 1530, this was the most printed book in Europe and influenced Roman
Catholicism through the Middle Ages. Stevens references Voragine in
"Colloquy with a Polish Aunt" (68). [Regensburg]
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Wahl,
Jean
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[Lavery]
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Weeping
Burgher, The
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The
first-person speaker in “The Weeping Burgher.”
It is possible that the weeping burgher is the poet as the poet
sees him/herself. Apparently,
the poet laments the message his/her work brings: “it is with a strange
malice that I distort the world” (48).
Similarly, the poem closes with the weeping burgher mourning the
nature of his/her being: “I, weeping in a calcined heart, my hands such
sharp, imagined things” (48). See
Burghers of Petty Death. [Crum]
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Weil,
Simone
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(1909-1943).
French religious writer and philosopher. [Lavery]
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Well
Dressed Man with a Beard
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This
character is the title of a short poem. If the character is read as the
speaker of the poem, then he is seems at first exceeding well pleased with
himself and the world as he sees it. There is, however, an incongruity in
the frivolous manner with which he so willingly casts off all but the one
thing that he claims gives him such joy. For all his brave show of words,
the final line reveals a deeper dissatisfaction that can't be overcome so
flippantly. [Haynes]
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Whitehead,
Alfred North
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(1861-1947).
British mathematician and philosopher, author (with Bertrand Russell) of
Principia Mathematica (1913), Science and the Modern World (1925), and
Process and Reality (1929). [Lavery]
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Whitman, Walt
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(1819-92).
19th century American poet, one of America's greatest. His poetry is
collected in Leaves of Grass, a book he revised throughout his career. He
was the author as well of Democratic Vistas (1871), prose essays. Alluded
to in “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery.” [Lavery]
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Williams,
William Carlos
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(1883-1963).
A practicing physician and one of the most important modern American
poets, author of such books as Collected Poems (1934), Pictures from
Brueghel (1963; Pulitzer), and Paterson (1946-58), an attempt at an epic
poem. He also wrote critical essays short stories, plays, and novels. [Lavery]
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Woman
in Sunshine, The
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[O’Neal]
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Woman
Looking at a Vase of Flowers
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[Regensburg]
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Woman
That Had More Babies Than That, The
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[Rhodes]
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Woolf,
Virginia
|
(1882-1941).
British "stream-of-consciousness" novelist and critic, member of
the Bloomsbury group, and author of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the
Lighthouse (1928), Orlando (1928), A Room of One's Own (1929), The Waves
(1931). She committed suicide by drowning herself in a stream in Sussex. [Lavery]
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Xenophon
|
(c.430
B.C.-c.355 B.C.). Greek historian, a disciple of Socrates. Alluded to
“Examination of the Hero in a Time of War” [Lavery]
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Young
Captain, A
|
[Lavery]
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Zeller,
Old John
|
John
Zeller, the maternal great-grandfather of Wallace Stevens, died in 1858
and is buried at St. Paul’s Church, Amityville, PA; he is one subject of
Stevens’s persistent research into his family’s genealogy.
“The Bed of Old John Zeller” (287) expresses the human tendency
to lean on tradition, or the established ideas of other men:
“This is the habit of wishing, as if one’s grandfather lay / In
one’s heart and wished as he had always wished” (8-9). [Wright]
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