Modern Poetry ∫ The MOD Blog

Snow Day

Poems on page 247 of our anthology.

(2) In the Wallace Stevens poems we read for Wednesday–“The Snow Man” and “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”–Stevens seems more successful than either Eliot or Pound in creating a sort of inward reserve that resists the pressures in the post-war world around him. How does Stevens pull off this feat, and is the end result a powerful testament to the powers of the imagination, or cowardly escape into the abstract landscapes of the mind?

In “The Snow Man” Stevens takes a moment to let nature simply be nature. He asks the reader to “behold” nature and “not think of any misery in the sound of the wind” (5, 7-8). He asks the reader not to project himself into the wind because the wind is just that: the wind. Whatever else is the poet. The final stanza further elucidates this further:

 “For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” (13-15).

The implication of this is a highly religious sentiment. If the listener brings nothing to the wind, he will realize what the wind is and that whatever he is, is not the wind. It is profound in its simple truth, considering that poetry is fond of manipulating everything natural to its human whim. Poetry so often refuses to let the nightingale be a nightingale. Poetry would prefer to make a zoo animal of him. Sometimes, like Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar. Why can’t the wind be wind?

The Palaz of Hoon from Stevens’s poem “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” is a place that resides entirely in the poet’s mind. It is “out of my mind,” says the speaker, that the details of the scene are revealed (7). The speaker claims that “I was the world in which I walked” and in his escapism he claims that “there I found myself more truly and more strange” (10, 12). The work of the imagination is self-discovery.

When comparing his work to Eliot or Pound, the first difference that comes to mind is that Wallace Stevens did not invent a character like Mauberely or Prufrock. He also, as far as I know, never adopted any Antisemitism or Fascist sympathies (Both Eliot and Pound fell victim to the first, Pound to the second).

While the significance of Pound to Eliot and Eliot to Pound is great, I am not sure about the significance of either of them to Stevens. He, living his life in the United States apart from a collaborative poetic life in Europe, could be said to be free from their direct influence.

Wallace Stevens has been called a poet of the mind. Eliot and Pound, then, are more likely poets of the world. They are not free from its influences quite like Stevens is. Stevens sees himself “strange” in his poetry because he knows himself. Others might not be able to see it, as they are not as familiar with his mind (how could they be?).

I would call it escapism, but not cowardly. To express the innermost and make it intelligible to the reader is difficult, even heroic, work. Wallace Stevens coped with a changing world by using his imagination. Eliot, according to Williams Carlos Williams, took Poetry a step backwards with The Waste Land. The same could probably be said for Pound’s Cantos. Wallace Stevens represents freedom of the mind and this freedom is reflected in his free flowing form. I worry what form a mind mixed with Antisemitism and fascist ideology might make.

 Happy snow day!

Claude McKay stood out for many reasons as a poet in the twentieth century; according to Ramazani, McKay’s Afro-Caribbean and African American influences contributed largely to the “masterful creole verse of later Jamaican poets,” yet he strove to exist beyond any cultural limitations and wrote in Standard English, even adopting the primary form of the sonnet (499, 499). However, instead of committing to the traditional romanticized notions affiliated with the sonnet form, McKay infused his poetry with “‘life long hate’ into the typically love-filled rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter of the Shakespearean sonnet” (499). By challenging the ideals associated with the sonnet, McKay’s work stands out amongst others, as his poems are filled with an intense “tension” created by the neat juxtaposition between the “strict form” of the sonnet and “molten subject” material (499). As Vanderzee explained in his email, McKay faced a unique perspective “as a black poet in the very much white-washed world of poetry,” one that enabled him to touch on the realities of a racially segregated world.

“The Harlem Dancer” may be construed as a response to McKay’s own experience as someone who lived in Harlem working “odd jobs” to support himself while he continued to write poetry during World War I (499). The context of this poem may be one of a realistic depiction of Harlem at the time, where night clubs with scantily clad dancers were a normal form of entertainment for a predominantly white audience. McKay describes a vivid scene: a dancer, “her perfect, half-clothed body” and her voice like “the sound of blended flutes” who is the object of attention, however McKay is careful to bring beauty to a somewhat seedy-subject matter. He gives the scene luxurious connotations by describing her dance as “graceful and calm,” and details how her “shiny curls/luxuriant fell.” Yet he is certain to bring the reader back to the startling reality of the scenario where the dancer is the object of greedy voyeuristic eyes, ones that are there “tossing coins in praise,” and “devour[ing] her shape with eager, passionate gaze[s].” Despite the somewhat degrading sense of the poem, McKay closes “The Harlem Dancer” with two lines which subtly indicate the quiet radical nature of this otherwise belittled dancer, as he writes: “But looking at her falsely-smiling face,/ I knew her self was not in that strange place.” Perhaps McKay closes the poem this way to indicate to readers a sense of righteousness in the shadow of racial segregation and gender oppression. In these final lines the reader may understand the dancer as being able to exist beyond the predetermined social contexts of her existence as a prostitute in a nightclub, as he gives us a sense of her true nature, one latent with pride and an inherent knowing that she is not defined by the act she is performing or the eyes subjecting her to a degraded place, rather, she maintains the secret understanding that she is above it all, and does not mentally exist in the space she physically occupies at that time.

Similarly, we see a sense of voyeurism and spectacle in McKay’s “The Lynching,” which has undertones of both a religious and a racial nature. He describes a scene where a man is brought to his death as a result of committing an “awful sin” which “remained still unforgiven.” McKay suggests that it is perhaps by the “solitary star” of fate that this man’s actions guided him to committing a sin so unforgivable that it indeed defined him as someone worthy of such a gruesome death. We can identify the similarity between these two McKay poems when we look at the latter half of “The Lynching,” which describes the man’s body as an image of his moral integrity, one “hung pitifully o’er the swinging char,” serving as a show to those that came to watch. This man becomes the very object of a sin, as his “ghastly body” remains “swaying in the sun” for “mixed crowds [who] came to view” the very result of committing an unforgivable act. Also similar to “The Harlem Dancer,” McKay closes “The Lynching” with a final two lines which hold the most weight of the poem: “And little lads, lynchers that were to be,/ Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.” This startling image of children dancing around the dead body almost parallels the grotesque nature of the dead body itself, because it details the type of uninhibited voyeurism that enraptures society so much so that it is predicted to carry on to the next generation; a perpetual sense of satisfaction found in the failure of others.

When one thinks of poetry, what often comes to mind is a world of free thinking and individual expression. The work of African American poet Claude McKay tells a different story. McKay, in his poetry, talks about the struggles of being a black man in an oppressive 1920’s America.  His use of the sonnet form is extremely interesting to me. The constrictions of the sonnet, coupled with the subject matter that fills his poems, are almost a comment to society. McKay seems to intentionally wall himself in with the poem as if to fit into a neat little box that society has set up for him. To them, he is not just a poet; he is a “black poet” and is pigeonholed by that label. McKay fights this label however by pushing against the boundaries set by the sonnet by filling his work with themes that would be less than pleasing to a white audience. While this can be seen in most of his work, it is also prevalent in his poems “America” and “The White City”.

“America” paints the picture of lady liberty sinking her teeth into McKay, letting the

Courtesy of Wake Forrest School of Law

troubles and obstacles he faces everyday poison his bloodstream (ll. 1-3). He yearns however to rebel against the hate which he encounters, to combat that which holds him down, to speak out and be heard in way like never before. There is a sense of fear in that though. His only action is to hope for better days to come (ll. 8-12). The poem “The White City”, while along the same train of thought, takes a slightly different approach the idea of feeling caged by America. This poem is somewhat of a rallying cry, a call to arms against the forces that oppress him. In lines six and seven McKay makes evident by saying “If this dark passion that fills my every mood/ and makes my heaven in the white world’s hell” (ll. 6-7). He is not letting the world he is trapped in keep him down. McKay is willing to fight for happiness in the world that he feels a stranger to. He is going to set up camp within the walls of hate filled land, and go to battle with constraints; whether they are societal or poetic in nature.