The Poetry of Sensuousness
Favoring Harmonium's "sensualism", as exampled in Metaphors of a Magnifico, marks a divide among critics, for there are many who, like Vendler, champion the later poetry. "I think, with others, that Stevens' powers increased with age," she writes.
Josephson chooses these lines from Banal Sojourn to illustrate Stevens's poetry of sensuousness:
The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black.
The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air.
Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom.
Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew...
Josephson's objection to this side of Stevens is that he in his next book "would have to be more and more intimate and scandalous, ad absurdum", and that already this side "has influenced many of his younger contemporaries, and in them, at least, leads to pretense, and murkiness."
Read more about this topic: Harmonium (poetry Collection)
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