The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play

Stevens is an uncommon writer in that much of his greatest work he produced late in his lifetime. Perhaps its depth, maturity, and beautiful language result in some part from this fact. His poetry is delightful to read and hear, wrought with powerful imagery and provocative questions about art, the world, and reality. I find myself reading certain poems regularly, over and over again. The Palm at the End of the Mind is a great collection, though it includes little more than Stevens' selected works - nothing in the way of comments, direction, or information about particular poems nor about Stevens and his views.

I was totally ignorant of Wallace Stevens until I came to Yale and took Professor Harold Bloom's course "How to Read a Poem." American poetry, as I, a Chinese student of a non-English major, understood it, is Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In contrast, Wallace Stevens's name was strange to most Chinese intellectuals till recently. Even in his native country his rise to a canonical status was not immediate. Eliot's The Waste Land and Stevens' Harmonium debuted around the same time, but the former took all the spotlight. A mysterious "X" recurs in some of Stevens's letters and poems. This "X" refers to no other than Eliot, which may reflect a degree of frustration on the part of Stevens. Not until his late years did Stevens slowly but surely receive the recognition he deserved. A lagging effect in cross-lingual translation and interpretation may explain Stevens's relative invisibility to the Chinese audience. In addition, Stevens, especially in his later years, was highly meditative and philosophical, at times difficult and obscure, which also affected his accessibility to foreign readers. Professor Bloom's class first initiated me into the force and beauty of Stevens's poetry. What intrigues me is that Stevens lived a double life. He was an insurance lawyer in profession and a poet in private, and seemed to have no difficulty alternating between the two seemingly incompatible roles. Just like his work is so original that they defy any easy label, Stevens's life is so eccentric that he contradicts the stereotype of what a poet is supposed to be like. This is particularly astonishing in the eyes of the Chinese, for in our tradition commerce and poetry have very little in common. Chinese poets are easily associated with scholars, officials, hermits, monks, artists, but it is hard to think of any example of successful poet-businessmen. I especially love "The Poems of Our Climate," a short piece written in 1938, when the poet was 59 years old. It was a number of years on from "The Idea of Order in the Key West." For Stevens, it was a central poem. Stevens's poetic odyssey spanning over half a century was punctuated by two puzzling breaks: in 1898-1900, Stevens, a Harvard student poet, contributed regularly to Harvard Advocate. After he left Cambridge for New York, his poetry writing stopped short. After a complete silence of seven years when Stevens was struggling with his business career, in 1907 he began to present love songs to his muse Elsie Moll, and his creative faculty seemed to return. In 1923, Stevens, at the age of 44, finally published his first volume of poems, Harmonium. The book's poor reception and its author's growing domestic and corporate responsibilities almost led him to abandon poetry again. For four years Stevens published little. Not until 1929 did Stevens resume poetry writing. Like the Irish poet W.B.Yeats and the Chinese poet Du Fu, the bulk of Stevens's best work was not done until his late years. Interestingly,

Wallace Stevens is one of those rare writers who had a golden touch with words -- musical words, spellbinding imagery, and no boundaries to keep anyone from enjoying it. "The Palm at the End of the Mind : Selected Poems and a Play" brings together many of his best works, starting early in his writing career and stretching through the years. Over his lifetime, Stevens wrote several books of poetry, but his exquisite poems are best taken by themselves: the languid splendour of "Sunday Morning," the spare eloquence of "Man With A Blue Guitar," and the hymnlike grandeur of "Le Monocle De Mon Oncle." ("I know no magic trees, no balmy boughs,/No silver-ruddy, gold-vermilion fruits./But, after all, I know a tree that bears/A semblance to the thing I have in mind.") This volume also contains his little-known one-act play, "Bowl, Cat and Broomstick." Like many of his non-poetic works, this play deals with the nature of poetry, and is in the form of a dialogue between three seventeenth-century characters. It's part parody, part analysis. And while it's a bit weird, it's certainly worth reading. Wallace Stevens began publishing poetry at an importance time in writing history, when the older styles were falling away. But instead of ignoring one type of poetry in favor of another, he took the best of all kinds -- his verse combines Victorian opulance with the more modern free-form verse. Though he isn't as well known as Yeats or Williams, Stevens' poetry is one of the few kinds that is both technically good and emotionally rich. His poetry can be whimsical ("Every time the bucks went clattering/Over Oklahoma/A firecat bristled in the way"), but it is also meditative and philosophical, even tackling the nature of reality. If nothing else, Stevens' writing can be read just because it is exquisitely beautiful. He lavished details all over almost every poem he wrote; his style tends to be a bit on the ornate side -- Stevens freely uses the more exotic terms -- such as "opalescence," "pendentives" and "muleteers" -- wrapped up in complex verse, sometimes with a rhyme scheme and sometimes free-form. "The Palm at the End of the Mind" is a wonderful collection of Wallace Stevens' most significant long poems, his underrated play, and his equally important smaller ones. A must-have.

I have had a love affair with Wallace Stevens' work and "The Palm at the End of the Mind" for almost three decades. My favorite Wallace Stevens' poem is "The Man With the Blue Guitar." This poem is fabulous spoken aloud - I loved it so much that I memorized it! "The Men That Are Falling" is rather like the hour between 3AM-4AM, very contemplative - when it seems like you can feel eternity. I hope that you enjoy this book as much as I have.

One of the three major creative forces in the verse of this century, Wallace Stevens, like Yeats and Eliot, rewards repeated readings, and The Palm at the Mind is a fine place to start. Every poem inside its pages shows Stevens's distinctive musicality, moral sophistication, and virtuoso command of the language, combined with his signature unexpectability. This last trait often results in something close to playfulness, and how Stevens's poetry balances such lingual fun with philosophical authority is one of the primary miracles of his art.In these poems Stevens combines technical mastery approaching Yeats's with a cerebralness typically associated with Eliot. Yet Stevens's work is more emotionally complex than the Irish poet's and more nimble and sure than the English expatriot's. While Stevens is the only American of the three, his verse is unemcumbered by geography or nationalism.Reading The Palm at the End of the Mind pleases on so many levels-the wordplay of The Emperor Of Ice Cream, the Zen feel of Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird, the fertility of O Florida, Venereal Soil, the music of The Man With The Blue Guitar, the philosophy of Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself, the self-consciousness of Of Modern Poetry. Or one can enjoy virtually all of these things at once in masterpieces like The Idea Of Order At Key West, Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction, or The Sail Of Ulysses.This definitive collection is not only essential poetry for one's collection but, more importantly, good reading as well.