The highest fictional notes: Stevens' poems and essays
(American) Author Stevens
Zhang Zao, Chen Dongdong
East China Normal University Press
Version 1, March 2009
The first to read Wallace? Stevens' poem, in a folk poem newspaper called Cold Dew compiled by my friend in the 1980s. I still remember his famous poem "Tennessee jar", which is now mostly translated into "anecdote of jar" or "anecdote of jar" At that time, I just started to turn to modern poetry writing, and I could not avoid being influenced by his poetic style. Even though he didn't fully understand the meaning of his poems, he still enjoyed his imagination and excitedly imitated his poetic form and mysterious tone.
Stevens became famous very late, publishing his first book of poetry at the age of 43, and publishing his second book more than ten years later. It was not until the age of 76 that I reluctantly published the complete works, or because I was suffering from cancer, I smelled the smell of death approaching. Today, I don't think Stevens is a late bloomer, but a progressive and patient master, a language practitioner who disdains prestige beyond poetry. Stevens is used to it-consuming his extremely excited imagination in the form of poetry. He insists that imagination is the only remedy for the seclusion of the gods and the only possible comfort for human beings when they encounter the world.
His collection of poems, Notes on the Highest Novel, is an unusual and fantastic book, which has been quietly listed in China recently, but it has brought surprises to Stevens fans. Compared with other modernist poets, such as Eliot's The Waste Land and Pound's poems, Stevens is the opposite. His famous poem Thirteen Ways to See Blackbirds is short and pithy, but it contains infinite imagination and intuitive tension. In another article "Tea Talk at Hoon Palace", Stevens wrote: "I am the world where I roam,/everything I see and hear comes from myself; /I feel more real there. "
Stevens said, "God is imagination." When imagination acts on reality, everything can be created and poetry can be created. It is said that in this era when imagination is obviously weakened, technology is changing people's lives, so poetry is particularly out of date. Paradoxically, the poetic world's favor and love for realistic themes makes it an alternative to talk about imagination again. However, when I revisit Stevens' classic poems and poetics, it is these abstract thoughts and the direct enjoyment of the senses that give me a different feeling. In fact, his poems are closer to pure art, and his metaphysical thinking opens the door to the soul.
Stevens' poems are famous for their obscure meanings, but they are also called "poets among poets". I benefited a lot from him. It can be said that my enlightenment to modern poetry began with him. All his praise for imagination is not isolated from the surface of the world, but from this angle. Stevens said: "Imagination is a kind of power, which enables us to perceive normality in anomalies and order in chaos." It is precisely because of this that his poems have philosophical significance and surpass philosophy with its unspeakable artistic charm.