Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Jim Salvucci's avatar

I’m a big fan of Wallace Stevens as well and am keenly aware of his whiteness and his class biases. Nonetheless, I’m not entirely following your take on “Worms.” Badroulbadour is a character in the Aladdin tale from 1001 Arabian Nights. The name is not some amalgam drawn from Stevens’ or the “West’s” Orientalist imagination so far as I am aware. I’m not denying the Orientalist implications of the name, but it’s hard to put aside Stevens’ love of wordplay. Badroulbadour is a type: the beautiful and seemingly unattainable woman who inspires ambition. More importantly, “ Badroulbadour” is a hell of a lot more fun to read aloud than, say, “Helen of Troy.” The poem is a contemplation of the fragility of beauty as much as anything else and therefore makes a nice companion to “Sunday Morning.”

As for your implied interpretation of “The Snow Man,” as I’m sure you’re aware, there are two diametrically opposed ways of reading the poem, depending on the meaning of “must” in the first line. Does the word “must” form an imperative (“You really should have a mind of winter”) as you suggest or is it more an expression of exasperation (“You have got to be out of your wintery mind to think such things”)? The former makes the poem out to be Stevens’ rejection of the pathetic fallacy. The latter makes the poem out to be a rejection of hyper-literalism. The evidence in the poem itself, I think, is too limited to decide between the two, but if the poem means the latter, that puts a whole other cast on the whiteness—that one can and perhaps should imagine other pigment possibilities. Then again, it is all still so damn white!

Anyway, another great piece by you. I really enjoy your writing and had fun with this one.

Expand full comment
Susan Linehan's avatar

I love Stevens, not least because his day job was as surety lawyer, as was mine. He was a VP, however, and got to order his clerks to go round searching for the perfect word. I was a mere "senior" and have to scrounge up my own.

I am startled by the idea that The Snow Man has anything much to say about "Whiteness." It has much more to do with freezing, with cold, does it not? And snow, outside the stuff piled up by the plows on the side of the road, is well, white.

I read it in relation to the other poems I love of his that consider the question of "making the world"--how our consciousness has much more to do with our perceptions and how they shape what we see. As I read more and more on the actual neuroscience of perception, I get more entranced with this function of the mind: to turn all those electrical impulses that are all our brain can actually "see" (or hear, etc) into a coherent world with some predictability but some quirks (consider the young woman/crone optical illusion).

The poem that comes first to mind, of course, is The Idea of Order at Key West, though it is also in many other poems. And if our consciousness fastens on winter, what do we see? The nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.

Expand full comment
5 more comments...

No posts