Wallace Stevens reads Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour

[0davus]

...For all of his recherche vocabulary Stevens is a really organic poet. he talks about growth and existence as such while so many poets are content to compose social situations in rhyming phrases. Stevens used poetry for something TV, cinema, even music and painting could never communicate, only poetry can do it.

[0davus]

Wallace Stevens is probably the biggest poet of the 20thC in English, at least since Hart Crane died young. He writes weird stuff but strip away the unfunny jokes and you find heroic rhetoric like this. And - you can tell he didn't practice the phrasing / prosody but I like his reading! It sounds like he enjoys breathing his words; he really lived in the world in his poetry. It was like a physiological function for him, part of his health and still from his soul as well.

[yekdeli]

IMHO the most beautiful poem ever

[TheBlueGuitarMan]

A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

This poem is GENIUS.

[luthiersunite]

@TheBlueGuitarMan Agreed, but I seriously dislike the reading. There is that thin line between letting the words sing out for all that they are worth, as any good reader should, and letting the flow of the poem decay into a dull dirge. Stevens' often joyful poetry, even this more sombre piece, deserves more than that. I hate to criticise the great man, but I would do the same regarding Eliot's readings.