There Being Nothing Else.

Stevens resists the mind almost successfully, as a poet should. Let's not talk about things that cannot be put into words; let us talk about things that can be put into words. We don't want to just deal with the “woooo,” the things that we just cannot put into words. If we cannot find the words for it, we must remain silent. I feel I spend too much of this class silent. I need to find something to hold on to.

“He who knows does not speak, and he who speaks does not know.”

There is nothing boring about the poem, the poem finds you to be boring. The poem finds me to be misleading. “I have been with you my whole life, and I will end my life thinking about you.”

Wallace Stevens is waiting for us where the sidewalk ends. Originally poems needed to do four things, but they Stevens decided that they did not need to be human, and that three was a better number anyways. If we can get rid of our illusions, we can get rid of everything that stands between us and pleasure.

There are three instances of mystical marriages in Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction. Reading poetry is desperately important for your psychological health. Obviously I need to read the poems again.

Choose a canto – not necessarily one that you understand. In fact, it should not be familiar or comfortable at all. Choose something that makes you feel uncomfortable, that is odd, and asks you to deal with it. You do not have to understand it, but you do have to engage it. Stevens wonders if he can use that same sense of participation to reengage you with the world, to help you become what you used to be – everything.

Harold Bloom would like us to know that not only does Notes resist the imagination almost successfully, it resists the imagination almost completely successfully.

Choose a canto to write about in your blog for next time.

Mysticism is when you have an experience with the divine, where there is no dividing line. There are only ordinary things, but Stevens wants you to understand that these ordinary things are the most beautiful things that ever happened to you.

There are moments in which we more than awaken.