Wallace Steven, writes,
"On Receiving an Honorary Degree from Bard College." (page 837)
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:
The act
of conferring an honor on a poet is a poetic act. By a poetic act I mean an act
that is a projection of poetry into reality. The act of conferring an academic
honor on a poet is a poetic act specifically because it engages all those that
participate in it with at least the idea of poetry, for at least a moment, that
is to say it engages them with something that is unreal, s if they had opened a
door and stepped into another dimension full of the potentialities of any
dimension not immediately calculable. What is unreal here is the idea of poetry
and the projection of that idea into this present place. To choose the
immediate act as an illustration of the poetic act is a choice of expediency
only.
Stevens elucidates on the
observed "moment" and engagement in the "unreal." It calls
to mind the poem Dr. Sexson suggested for memorization (page 187), "The
Latest Freed Man". I ask myself, "Is there an expediency of the
observed moment?" And, "What is the engagement in the unreal?"
In the first part of
"The Latest Freed Man", the author describes the context of what
happens to a man upon waking as he "sat on the edge of his bed." The
description seems to recount a potentially real context.
Tired of the old descriptions of the world,
The latest freed man rose at six, and sat
On the edge of his bed.
In the next part, Stevens
describes how the fictional man describes what happened, how he thinks about
what happened. The imaginary man creates an act of poetry in, as Stevens
defines (page 837), creating air and space to think about remote things such as
the elusive "doctrine of the landscape", and things in the moment,
"the moment's rain and sea, / The moment's sun (the strong man vaguely
seen)." Stevens compares what we see to poetry, "Just as in space the
air envelops objects far away with an ever-deepening blue, so in the dimension
of the poetic act the unreal increasingly subtilizes experience and varies
appearance. The real is constantly being engulfed in the unreal." Stevens
clarifies the act of poetry as thinking, whether liking or not, about something
real such as the life of the rich; which is a life we do not share which makes
it unreal.
He
said,
"I suppose there is
A doctrine to this landscape. Yet, having just
Escaped from the truth, the morning is color and mist,
Which is enough; the moment's rain and sea,
The moment's sun (the strong man vaguely seen),
Overtaking the doctrine of this landscape. Of him
And of his works, I am sure. He bathes in the mist
Like a man without a doctrine. The light he gives--
It is how he gives his light. It is how he shines,
Rising upon the doctors in their beds
And on their beds. . . .
And on their beds. . . .
And
so the freed man said.
In the third part,
Stevens speaks of what just happened to the man and how it came to be. His
thinking changes "our sense of the texture of life, but it does not
falsify the texture of life (page 837)" because the poet's thinking and
how he describes the poet embedded in the would-be ox was never a "poetic
act of faith in reality because it could not be (page 838)." We are called
to attend to the meaning, the value for the poet to think about the poetic act.
"Ordinarily the poet is associated with the word, not with the act; and
ordinarily the word collects its strength from the imagination or, with its
aid, from reality."
It was how the sun came shining into his room:
To be without a description of to be,
For a moment on rising, at the edge of the bed, to be,
To have the ant of the self changed to an ox
With its organic boomings, to be changed
From a doctor into an ox; before standing up,
To know that the change and that the ox-like struggle
Come from the strength that is the strength of the sun,
Whether it comes directly or from the sun.
In this instance, the
poetic moment, the "strength that is the strength of the sun" seems
to reflect the imagination, the thinking of the unreal about the real; building
the strength of the ox, the vaguely seen but now a strong man cleansed of
doctrine, freed of description. Stevens suggests the act of poetry reveals the
value of the meaning to the poet.
It was how he was free. It was how his freedom came.
Somewhere between two
worlds, the imagination and reality, the poet "strengthens himself to
resist the bogus. He has become like a man who can see what he wants to see and
touch what he wants to touch (page 838)." Stevens suggests the poem as
evidence of what can be; the poem is instance and illustration. "It is an
illumination of a surface, the movement of a self in the rock. Above all it is
a new engagement with life. It is that miracle to which the true faith of the
poet attaches itself." The way of truth, according to Wallace Stevens, is
the way of the poem as act: imagination with the aid of reality.
It was how he was free. It was how his freedom came.
It was being without description, being an ox.
It was the importance of the trees outdoors,
The freshness of the oak leaves, not so much
That they were oak-leaves, as the way they looked.
It was everything being more real, himself
As the centre of reality, seeing it.
It was everything bulging and blazing and big in itself,
The blue of the rug, the portrait of Vidal,
Qui fait fi des joliesses
banales, the
chairs.
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