Poetry Is a Destructive Force
That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.
It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.
Corazón, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.
He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own . . .
The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.
That's a poem by Wallace Stevens, so don't think I'm taking credit for it. But it's stuck with me since I read it X years ago. In a way that I wouldn't be so arrogant as to try to explain it or pick it apart. So I'll just touch on a couple of things.
It's a bold statement that "poetry is a destructive force." One you might expect to hear from some insane crusader, not an actual poet. So what is it that poetry destroys? In some cases, the poet. Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath are notorious cases, although I believe this poem predates their final stages. But they weren't the first.
But this is not a dry exposé of poetic self-destructiveness. There's something else. If poetry works differently on the mind than do other things, you don't know what it's going to unleash.
Most of the lines are quite short. They don't tell, they just are.
2 comments:
I remember another poem by Wallace Stevens you wrote about in the past and that was The Snow Man - 'One must have a mind of winter' it began. Having enjoyed it I can understand just how effective you've found his work. But Poetry Is a Destructive Force is more difficult for me to grasp - the metaphors are strong and the imagery intense yet are more than a little incomprehensible. Although the poem hasn't come to me quickly, the sounds, the beautiful language, and imagery made it a fascinating reading experience.
It appears that unlike either Sylvia Plath or Dylan Thomas, or a number of other poets, Wallace Stevens came to his art much later in life. His ability to see reality but to filter it through his imagination was masterful.
You know, I had forgotten that I had written about Stevens on this blog before. But this is the fourth one. One of the previous had a link to a Vimeo video of a lady acting one of his poems out. "The Snowman" didn't show up, but I'm sure I wrote about it somewhere, since it's a stunning poem. On the one hand, I should probably vary things up and write about a different poet here or there. But the imagery and heightened drama of Stevens are part of what make him one of my faves.
Most poets do start younger. And of course in the case of Thomas and Plath they burned themselves out young as well, more in terms of living than writing. Stevens had already established himself in a "straight career", working as an insurance lawyer. His colleagues may have seen the poetry thing as an eccentricity and/or poor person envy.
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