Two or Three Ideas talks about how all the ideas that have come before are just trash now. We cannot go back to a past glory and see things the way they were, because that no longer exists.
“In the age of disbelief...it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief...”
200-300 years ago, the institutions and arbiters were the people who supplied our beliefs, but now that job is for the poet, for anyone who sees the world poetically, and those are some big shoes to fill.
“To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences.”
How do we respond to the way in which we have been stripped of those psychological aids? The best way to respond is with a sense of wonder, as in How to Live, What to Do. It is up to us to find new things that might suffice through our imaginations. It is up to build a new world out of the trash of the old one.
Sexson has even assigned himself a poem: Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu.
There will be a day that will remind you, 30 years in the future, about this. Don't we all already know that Sexson has magic powers? The ordinary world in which ordinary stuff lies about you can be lit up by the imagination. Wallace Stevens is a dumpster diver – he knows how to take boring everyday things and bring them to life using only his imagination and his words.
Our little epiphanies are more like striking a match in the dark than being struck by a bolt of lightning – you will never truly see things as they are until you are dead.
When you are unpacking a poem, try to stick more closely to the original poem and don't leave things out! The thing you leave out might very well be the most important.
We don't even know who left the legacy, but we do know what the legacy is all about, and maybe it's okay that we don't know.
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