"Explanation" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published in 1917, so it is in the public domain.
| Explanation
Ach, Mutter, Not by way of romance, It would have been different, |
This poem may be an explanation of the difference between conventional decoration and artistic imagination, the latter represented, as Buttel proposes, by an allusion to Chagall and the otherworldly charm of his paintings.
Famous quotes containing the words stevens and/or explanation:
“It makes so little difference, at so much more
Than seventy, where one looks, one has been there before.
Wood-smoke rises through trees, is caught in an upper flow
Of air and whirled away. But it has been often so.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“How strange a scene is this in which we are such shifting figures, pictures, shadows. The mystery of our existence—I have no faith in any attempted explanation of it. It is all a dark, unfathomed profound.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)