Commentaries - June 2009

Impersonal & impervious to the pain of others

Of late the Wallace Stevens I especially admire is anxiously stuck — stuck and yet writing about it. He is entangled in an idiom he had come to accept, and attempts, in the very words we read, to write his way into another. Or he is seeking to reformulate his argument in the process of making it. Or he suffers a crisis of direction until the poem either does or does not make a turn. Or he believes he has come to the end of the imagination, beyond which is blank wordlessness.