Things As They Are.

It is possible to have two lines of poetry in which the words are identical and somehow still mean two different things. Human life oscillates between desire unfulfilled and desire fulfilled; pain and boredom. Stevens is a master of taking the simile and making it totally unexpected, like the spittle of cows threading in the wind. Sunday Morning is the ultimate displacement of the human being; it makes us totally and completely free and unconditioned.

Ashley said it ain't easy to give up all our illusions, those which we have been conditioned to believe by our culture. However, she is predispositioned to Stevens because she is actually a triplet, and Stevens likes to think in threes. Dante was also a trinitarian, writing in triple rhyme and connecting to the Biblical Trinity.

Decreation, Via Negativa, and Kenosis.

Negative Capability means that you can't actually know what you are talking about, you just know everything surrounding what you are talking about. Stevens wants to be a thinking stone. Alchemists were not actually frauds or charlatans; they were indeed removing all impurities of the base metal and making it into the purest stone. In some ways, Stevens had no more control over the stuff he was writing than Ashley has over being one of three; he was a modern-day alchemist although he never thought about that.

In Sunday Morning Stevens asked a question which was answered in Ideas of Order at Key West. His thought is that we should not put humans in the position of gods; gods are immortal and humans are not. Instead, in the place of god, we should put a fictional person: “...the final belief is to believe in a fiction which you know to be a fiction because there is nothing else.”

Ideas of Order is not a poem of kenosis, but of pleurosis, or being filled up.

genius (ˈdʒiːnɪəs, -njəs)

— n , pl ( for senses 5, 6 ) -uses , genii
1. a person with exceptional ability, esp of a highly original kind
2. such ability or capacity: Mozart's musical genius
3. the distinctive spirit or creative nature of a nation, era, language, etc
4. a person considered as exerting great influence of a certain sort: an evil genius
5. Roman myth
a. the guiding spirit who attends a person from birth to death
b. the guardian spirit of a place, group of people, or institution
6. ( usually plural ) Arabian myth a demon; jinn

Who is this impossible possible philosopher? What is the significance of the color blue? Blue is the color of the sea and sky, but it also calms you down and makes you mentally more able to accept things. The blue guitar does not show you the world as you perceive it, but the world as it actually is, because it is the world that you want to see.

Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,

Says the man with the blue guitar.

She comes along and speaks, and the world comes into being. Logos does not mean psychology; it means the divine creative principle, the speaking word that brings about the creation of the world. Speech can bring out things that have no being without words. "Valuation of the creative imagination is what brings the world into being." One may think of poetry as an eye, a way to see things. We are spectators before an act of poetic will.