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)
Famous quotes containing the words poetry and/or sensuousness:
“The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E.E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off and on for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry lovers.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The African race evidently are made to excel in that department which lies between the sensuousness and the intellectual—what we call the elegant arts. These require rich and abundant animal nature, such as they possess; and if ever they become highly civilised, they will excel in music, dancing and elocution.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)