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

by Wallace Stevens (Author), Holly Stevens (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"The Palm at the End of the Mind, superbly edited by Holly Stevens, will be the definitive text for students and readers of Wallace Stevens for several decades. Unlike earlier selected volumes, it gives all the major long poems and sequences, and every shorter poem of lasting value. Its arrangement in probable order of composition clarifies the entire shape of Stevens development, particularly by its restoration of crucial late lyrics the poet simply forgot to include in the Collected Poems. Other major benefits given us by the volume include the convenience of having in one place the best of Collected Poems, Opus Posthumous, and the poems heretofore available only in The Necessary Angel. Add to this the powerful early poem 'For an Old Woman in a Wig', the play Bowl, Cat and Broomstick, the prose statement on the poetry of war, the restored lines of 'The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,' and a number of vital textual corrections throughout, and some sense of the enormous value of this book will be achieved. Here is the indispensable presentation of a central American poet, the best and most representative of our time."

-- Harold Bloom, Yale University -- Review

(prose Statement On The Poetry Of War)
Academic Discourse At Havana
Academic Discourse At Havana: 2
Academic Discourse At Havana: 3
Academic Discourse At Havana: 4
Add This To Rhetoric
The American Sublime
Anatomy Of Monotony
Anecdote Of The Jar
Anecdote Of The Prince Of Peacocks
Angel Surrounded By Paysans
Anglais Mort A Florence
Another Weeping Woman
Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is
The Apostrophe To Vincentine
Arrival At The Waldorf
As At A Theatre
As You Leave The Room
Asides On The Oboe
Asides On The Oboe: 1
Asides On The Oboe: 2
Asides On The Oboe: 3
The Auroras Of Autumn
Autumn Refrain
Banal Sojourn
Bantams In Pine-woods
The Bed Of Old John Zeller
The Bird With The Coppery, Keen Claws
Blanche Mccarthy
The Brave Man
Certain Phenomena Of Sound
Chaos In Motion And Not In Motion
A Child Asleep In Its Own Life
Chocorua To Its Neighbor
A Clear Day And No Memories
The Comedian As The Letter C: 2. Concerning Thunderstorms ..
The Comedian As The Letter C: 3. Approaching Carolina
The Comedian As The Letter C: 4. The Idea Of A Colony
The Comedian As The Letter C: 5. A Nice Shady Home
The Comedian As The Letter C: 6. And Daughters With Curls
Connoisseur Of Chaos
Cortege For Rosenbloom
The Course Of A Particular
The Creations Of Sound
Credences Of Summer
Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, Et Les Unze Mille...
Dance Of The Macabre Mice
The Death Of A Soldier
Depression Before Spring
Description Without Place
A Discovery Of Thought
Disillusionment Of Ten O'clock
The Doctor Of Geneva
Domination Of Black
The Dove In The Belly
Dry Loaf
Dutch Graves In Bucks County
The Dwarf
Earthy Anecdote
The Emperor Of Ice-cream
Esthetique Du Mal
Evening Without Angels
Examination Of The Hero In A Time Of War
Extracts From Addresses To The Academy Of Fine Ideas
Fabliau Of Florida
A Fading Of The Sun
Farewell To Florida
Farewell To Florida: 2
Farewell To Florida: 3
Farewell To Florida: 4
Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour
First Warmth
Floral Decorations For Bananas
Flyer's Fall
For An Old Woman In A Wig: 1
For An Old Woman In A Wig: 2
For An Old Woman In A Wig: 3
From The Packet Of Anacharsis
Ghosts As Cocoons
The Glass Of Water
God Is Good. It Is A Beautiful Night
The Good Man Has No Shape
Gray Room
Gubbinal
The Hermitage At The Centre
A High-toned Old Christian Woman
The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm
Hymn From A Watermelon Pavilion
The Idea Of Order At Key West
Imago
In A Bad Time
In The Carolinas
Indian River
Infanta Marina
Inscription For A Monument
Jumbo
The Lack Of Repose
Landscape With Boat
Large Red Man Reading
Late Hymn From The Myrrh-mountain
The Latest Freed Man
Le Monocle De Mon Oncle
Lebensweisheitspielerei
Less And Less Human, O Savage Spirit
Life Is Motion
Like Decorations In A Nigger Cemetery
Lions In Sweden
Loneliness In Jersey City
Long And Sluggish Lines
Looking Across The Fields And Watching The Birds Fly
Lunar Paraphrase
Lytton Strachey, Also, Enters Into Heaven
Madame La Fleurie
Man And Bottle
Man Carrying Thing
The Man On The Dump
The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad
The Man With The Blue Guitar
Men Made Out Of Words
The Men That Are Falling
Metamorphosis
Metaphor As Degeneration
Metaphors Of A Magnifico
Montrachet-le-jardin
The Motive For Metaphor
Mountains Covered With Cats
Mozart, 1935
Mr. Burnshaw And The Statue: 1
Mr. Burnshaw And The Statue: 2
Mr. Burnshaw And The Statue: 3
Mr. Burnshaw And The Statue: 4
Mr. Burnshaw And The Statue: 6
Mr. Burnshaw And The Statue: 7
Mrs. Alfred Uruguay
A Mythology Reflects Its Region
No Possum, No Sop, No Taters
Nomad Exquisite
Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself
Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction: It Must Be Abstract
Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction: It Must Change
Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction: It Must Give Pleasure
Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction: Prelude
Nuances Of A Theme By Williams
O Florida, Venereal Soil
Oak Leaves Are Hands
Of Bright & Blue Birds & The Gala Sun
Of Hartford In A Purple Light
Of Heaven Considered As A Tomb
Of Ideal Time And Choice
Of Modern Poetry
The Old Lutheran Bells At Home
An Old Man Asleep
On The Manner Of Addressing Clouds
On The Road Home
On The Way To The Bus
An Ordinary Evening In New Haven
The Ordinary Women
Our Stars Come From Ireland
The Owl In The Sarcophagus
Paisant Chronicle
The Paltry Nude Starts On A Spring Voyage
Parochial Theme
A Pastoral Nun
Peter Quince At The Clavier
Phosphor Reading By His Own Light
The Place Of The Solitaires
The Plain Sense Of Things
The Planet On The Table
The Pleasures Of Merely Circulating
The Plot Against The Giant
Ploughing On Sunday
The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain
Poem With Rhythms
Poem Written At Morning
The Poems Of Our Climate
Poetry Is A Destructive Force
A Postcard From The Volcano
The Prejudice Against The Past
A Primitive Like And Orb
Prologues To What Is Possible
Puella Parvula
The Pure Good Of Theory
Questions Are Remarks
A Quiet Normal Life
A Rabbit As King Of The Ghosts
Re-statement Of Romance
The Reader
Reality Is An Activity Of The Most August Imagination
The River Of Rivers In Connecticut
The Rock
Sad Strains Of A Gay Waltz
The Sail Of Ulysses
Sailing After Lunch
Saint John And The Back-ache
Sea Surface Full Of Clouds
The Sense Of The Sleight-of-hand Man
The Silver Plough-boy
Six Significant Landscapes
The Snow Man
So-and-so Reclining On Her Couch
Some Friends From Pascagoula
Someone Puts A Pineapple Together: 1
Someone Puts A Pineapple Together: 2
Someone Puts A Pineapple Together: 3
Somnambulisma
Stars At Tallapoosa
Study Of Two Pears
The Sun This March
Sunday Morning
Te Dove In Spring
Tea
Tea At The Palaz Of Hoon
Things Of August
Thinking Of A Relation Between The Images Of Methaphors
Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird
This Solitude Of Cataracts
A Thought Revolved
To An Old Philosopher In Rome
To The One Of Fictive Music
To The Roaring Wind
Two Figures In Dense Violet Light
Two Illustrations That The World Is What You Make Of It
Two Illustrations That The World Is What You Make Of It
Two Versions Of The Same Poem, That Which Cannot Be Fixed: 1
Two Versions Of The Same Poem, That Which Cannot Be Fixed: 1
The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract
United Dames Of America
Valley Candle
Variations On A Summer Day
The Virgin Carrying A Lantern
Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu
A Weak Mind In The Mountains
The Well Dressed Man With A Beard
The Woman In Sunshine
A Woman Sings A Song For A Soldier Come Home
The World As Meditation
World Without Peculiarity
The Worms At Heaven's Gate
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Review
"The Palm at the End of the Mind, superbly edited by Holly Stevens, will be the definitive text for students and readers of Wallace Stevens for several decades. Unlike earlier selected volumes, it gives all the major long poems and sequences, and every shorter poem of lasting value. Its arrangement in probable order of composition clarifies the entire shape of Stevens development, particularly by its restoration of crucial late lyrics the poet simply forgot to include in the Collected Poems. Other major benefits given us by the volume include the convenience of having in one place the best of Collected Poems, Opus Posthumous, and the poems heretofore available only in The Necessary Angel. Add to this the powerful early poem 'For an Old Woman in a Wig', the play Bowl, Cat and Broomstick, the prose statement on the poetry of war, the restored lines of 'The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,' and a number of vital textual corrections throughout, and some sense of the enormous value of this book will be achieved. Here is the indispensable presentation of a central American poet, the best and most representative of our time."

-- Harold Bloom, Yale University

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (February 19, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679724451
• ISBN-13: 978-0679724452
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #413,957 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Setting Art Against Nature, August 6, 2005

By	Hongyu Huang (New Haven, CT USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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, these three literary lions unanimously fall in love with the fall season: Yeats admires the trees in their autumn beauty in "The Wild Swans at Coole"; Du Fu composed a cycle of regulated poems under the general title of "Autumn Meditations"; Stevens' last major poetic endeavor is no other than "The Auroras of Autumn." These pieces actually reflect the poets' "autumnal personality." As they are approaching that season of their life, their works become increasingly sophisticated, retrospective and sublime. The following lines from John Keats' "Ode to Autumn" might be particularly pertinent to their situations:

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,

"The Poems of Our Climate" was written in this "autumnal period" of the poet's life, thus belonging to the poetry of maturity. It is in three numbered sections. There is a break between each of the sections.

I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations - one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

Stevens's difficulty often lies in referentiality. The first section seems to have nothing to do with the title. There is no direct reference whatsoever to either "poems" or "our climate." Ostensibly the poet-persona is watching a Japanese flower arrangement. Stevens had a passion for oriental arts and philosophies. He was a close reader of Okakura Kakuzo (1862-1913), and his library was full of all kinds of books about Japanese flower arrangement. He was not only deeply read in this subject, but also had a habit of ordering fresh flowers from shops. The opening sentence introduces the image of flower arrangement by creating a pleasing word picture of balance, harmony and form. "Clear water" seems to be redundant, yet this rhetorical excess emphasizes the crystalline transparency of water. "Brilliant" etymologically means "to emit light, to reflect light," thus accentuating the shiny surface of the container. The combination of "pink and white carnations" brings a festival of inviting colors and textures that are traditionally associated with feminine innocence, charm and gentility. The origin of the word "carnation" in Latin confirms the connection between the flower and human flesh. Behind this image of sexual provocation is a male observer's voyeuristic and fetishistic desire. The first sentence sketches the key components of a flower arrangement (through three nouns: water, bowl and carnations), with an emphasis on their optical and chromatic effects in the eyes of a spectator (through four adjectives: clear, brilliant, pink and white), and thus anticipates the "light" in the following sentence. "[...]. The light / in the room more like a snowy air, / Reflecting snow" embraces and extends the aura around the flower arrangement: the interior light is not like snow falling, but rather like air reflecting fallen snow. The observer is so subtle that he cannot help but elaborating the snow image: during the winter the afternoons have been very brief; but now, with afternoons elongating, winter is near the end and somehow meets early spring, and a fresh snow lies immaculate on the ground, like a breathtaking artwork of Nature, which gives a pure, refreshing and ethereal tone to the air reflecting snow. This late-winter scene suggests that the observer, like "the snowman," wants "a mind of winter," but not a mind of deep winter. The light that gives luster to the flower arrangement, like the rainwater that glazes a red wheelbarrow (William Carlos Williams, "A Red Wheelbarrow"), works beautifully on both formal and metaphorical levels. It represents a natural light, but as part of an art world it also becomes an aesthetic light.

So far the language is very pictorial, in the manner of a still life. When Stevens portrays an object, he often builds a simple yet powerful image, omitting all insignificant details. Therefore, his image is at once concrete and abstract, familiar and unfamiliar, and appropriately distances itself from reality. In the first stanza of "The Poems of Our Climate," the image is very concrete and real: this is about a Japanese flower arrangement. Meanwhile, there is no extravagant description of the object, but a word picture almost in the style of a Chinese xieyi ("to convey the spirit") painting. It highlights the principal components of the flower arrangement (water, bowl and carnations), and throws away lesser details (such as the spatial disposition of flowers, the effect of foliage). The aesthetic atmosphere is not only created by the description of the object itself; it is also a product of the language. To use minimalism to achieve maximal effect - this is also the case for the language. The diction is basic English words, mostly monosyllabic and disyllabic. Stevens only suggests and expects the reader to complete the picture by himself.

"Pink and white carnations" recurs verbatim in line 6, implying that the observer moves his meditative eyes back to the core image. Then the poem abruptly takes another direction: "One desires / so much more than that." This jump from imagistic to argumentative language is visually strengthened with the use of a hyphen to connect a noun phrase and a full sentence. Meanwhile, "desire" corresponds to the etymological hint of carnation, and the whole question about desire will continue to inform the rest of the poem. "The day" is in opposition to whatever "in the room," designating the world external to the flower arrangement. Thus "[...] The day itself / is simplified" suggests that art reduces the outside world. "[...] a bowl of white, / Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round, / With nothing more than the carnations there." Once again, Stevens returns to visual imagery, but this is not a wanton repetition of the earlier lines, but rather a repetition with nuanced variations or a deliberate revision, as if the observer observes through a closer perspective. "Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round" introduces new details about the container and unmistakably echoes the "cold pastoral" in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." While "a bowl of white" seems a neutral description of what is seen, the "cold porcelain," just like Keats's cold urn, implies that this is a lifeless, artificial work. Although Stevens appreciates the aesthetic effect of the flower arrangement, subliminally he is not satisfied with its lifelessness and otherness to human world. He desires more: in the closure of the next stanza, he will repeat the word "more" thrice, where "more" becomes almost obsessive.

Now, get back to the title. How to justify "The Poems of Our Climate"? There are poets whose titles are throwaways, but not Stevens. Stevens cares a great deal about titles. His titles are always precise and integral to his poems. The first stanza seems to totally leave out the title, yet on a deeper level flower arrangement is a metaphor for poem writing. Metaphor is not an ordinary association of one object with another, but a figuration or trope which suggests the essence of one object by identifying it with certain qualities of another. Like Whitman, Stevens has an amazing command of figuration. For him, metaphor is a powerful means through which imagination imposes order on reality. "The Poems of Our Climate" opens with an objective description of clear water, brilliant bowl, pink and white carnations, and snowy light. As the poet is projecting his imaginary magic on those things, they will go through a metamorphosis and become metaphorical references to poetry writing, for both are the objects of formal arrangement, and both use delicate minimalism to achieve elaborate effect. Because this transfiguring act of mind is rooted in an objective world, the aura of duality shines through the images: they are at once flower arrangement and poetry writing. Indeed, what makes this poem "poetic" is the dynamic shifting back and forth between the real object and the metaphorical meanings it prompts.

II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

Stevens desires "complete simplicity," but such "simplicity" is a trope for reduction and deprives him of the necessary pain and suffering in writing a poem. The capitalistic "I" is arresting, since Stevens always uses the impersonal "one" ("one" occurs four times in this stanza and six times in the whole poem), yet here he says "The evilly compounded, vital I." In "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," "I" stands out again: "What am I to believe? ..." There is rhetorical power in the Stevensian "I," which is almost electrifying. It recalls Whitman's "real me" or "me myself" in "Song of Myself," for all these terms suggest a self that is one's consciousness but is a deeper and unknown part of one's consciousness. Stevens was very evasive about Whitman, one of his prime precursors. He never had anything good to say about Whitman in prose. Actually he blamed Whitman for Whitman's tramp persona. Yet, as Harold Bloom observes, "Whitman is a deeper and darker presence/absence in Stevens's work." Good poetry in any language always depends on allusiveness. This stanza echoes a couplet in "Song of Myself":

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me ...

As self-contradictory as the Whitmanian "real me" or "me myself," the Stevensian "I" is both "evilly-compounded" and "vital" (this word is never negative). Bloom unravels the paradox by arguing that "The `Vital I' is compounded evilly only because it is compounded at all." In other words, Stevens is talking about a radical duality of self or even a plurality of selves, on which he will not give a stable judgment. "Vital" is also to find its compelling resonance in "the never-resting mind" in the succeeding stanza. A critic believes that Stevens's inward peering "I" also implies its externally seeing homophone "eye." I agree with this insightful reading, for the whole poem is built upon the act of looking and seeing. "Still one would want more, one would need more, / More than a world of white and snowy scents" builds a crescendo of "mores" and reinforces the theme of desire. Stevens was from New Jersey and in his native language "scents" allegedly sounds like "senses," so here he might be making another homonymic pun.

In this stanza, "a world of white" recurs once more. This time, it is the word "brilliant-edged" that unfolds new information. The edge is between what two sides? Japanese flower arrangement draws materials from nature; meanwhile, it is cut and placed by people. Thus, it is a product of setting art against nature, so is poetry. The edge makes clear the dichotomy of art vs. nature. Fundamentally, high literature, especially poetry, is a continuous tradition. This poem explores a single motif that emerges again and again in a succession of strong poets - the relation between art and nature. Stevens is concerned with creating some shape of order in the wilderness and chaos of reality. On the other hand, he refuses to transform and harmonize reality at the cost of making violent imposition upon it. Shelley, in "A Defense of Poetry," realizes that "even the greatest poetry will, through time, become nothing more than signs for classes of thought, loosing its poetic edge as a result." To find the finer edge of words, Stevens urges us to get rid of the illusion of things and get to the truth. In Stevens's own words, "the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind." ("Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction")

This stanza is syntactically distinguished from the other stanzas for a single sentence runs through all seven lines, creating an extended "suspension system." The effect is to have the completion of meaning constantly delayed, and to make the delay a means of defamiliarizing the process of conferring meanings. "Say even that," like "more like" in line 3, is an American idiom, meaning "granted that." It introduces a concessive clause and distantly echoes the adverb "still" five lines later. This pair of connectives frames the whole sentence or stanza. While in the first stanza, imagery is the dominant device and noun structures prevail, this stanza is characterized by strong statements and powerful verbs. "Stripped," "concealed," "made it fresh" are positioned either at the beginning or the end of lines, and in sequence they make a set of structural parallels. This compels us to recognize their weight in the meaning-making process.

III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

If the last stanza closes with a litotes or an understatement in which one's desire is expressed by negating its opposite ("a world of white and snowy scents"), this stanza will directly address that keen desire of "the never-resting mind": "one would want to escape, come back / To what had been so long composed." Again and again in this poem, Stevens plays upon opposition and apposition. We have encountered "Stripped" and "concealed," "evilly-compounded" and "vital" before, and now the oxymoronic "escape" and "come back to" again force us to pause and think hard. "What had been so long composed" sounds like a Nietzschean cosmos, whose nut is hollow and lacking any purpose or unity. It also reminds us of the Shakespearean motto: "This is an art, which does mend nature, change it rather, but the art itself is nature" (Winter's Tale).

"The imperfect is our paradise" invites multiple readings as well. The first thing comes to mind is the famous biblical allusion. Since the fall, Adam and Eve had been expelled from the perfect Eden and living in the far-from-perfect earth. So, from the start human beings are destined to accept imperfection as our living paradise. This sentence also echoes the Robert Browning quote "A man's reach should exceed his grasp," suggesting that poetry writing is a tantalizing project. To achieve artistic perfection, one should attempt even those seemingly impossible things, despite all necessary pains and suffering. Moreover, "imperfect" in Latin means "unfinished." By brings back the etymological meaning of "imperfect," Stevens revisits the Whitmanian theme: "Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end."

This imperfect world demands an imperfect language, that is to say "flawed words and stubborn sounds." The closing sentence starts with an imperative expression "Note that" and takes on the tone of an academic lecture. The shift of pronouns from "one" or "I" to "our" or "us" strengthens this sense of reaching out to others. As the poem moves towards closure, it is getting more and more disturbing, and the reader can feel a profound malaise on the part of the poet. Again, "bitterness" and "delight" are set in opposition, suggesting a puzzling psychic construction. "The imperfect is so hot in us" means the desire for imperfection is so fierce in us. "Hot" is used to contrast the earlier "cold" ("Cold, a cold porcelain"), and both words can apply respectively to their core meaning and extended meaning. "Lies" is an even more intriguing polyseme: delight tells us untruth in flawed words and stubborn sounds, and also consists in such words and sounds. In "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," Stevens brings forward three fundamental functions of poetry: It Must Be Abstract; It Must Change; It Must Give Pleasure. So, he shares Shelley's view that joy is what poetry emanates from ("A Defense of Poetry"). Yet such a joy is achieved by flawed words and stubborn sounds, in other words, the stylistic eccentricity and strangeness in Stevens's word choice and his experiment with the musical quality of poetry.

Finally, in what sense do we know Stevens? Stevens is a poet of profound subjectivity. He is always working on wordplays, suggestions and subtlety. He is endless. We go down and down and down, and cannot reach the bottom, and would still want more and need more. He carries us so deep into nature and art and their intricate interplay.

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Here is essential poetry that remains good reading., April 2, 1999

By	Bill Ziegenfuss ([e-mail]) (Denver, CO) - See all my reviews

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At the end of the mind, April 19, 2005

By	E. A Solinas "ea_solinas" (MD USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.