The previous post suggests a Log24 search for
Stevens + Sorbonne. This yields …
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Michael Bryson in an essay on Stevens’s The Quest for the Fiction of the Absolute: Canto nine considers the movement of the poem between the particular and the general, the immanent and the transcendent: “The poem goes from the poet’s gibberish to / The gibberish of the vulgate and back again. / Does it move to and fro or is it of both / At once?” The poet, the creator-figure, the shadowy god-figure, is elided, evading us, “as in a senseless element.” The poet seeks to find the transcendent in the immanent, the general in the particular, trying “by a peculiar speech to speak / The peculiar potency of the general.” In playing on the senses of “peculiar” as particular and strange or uncanny , these lines play on the mystical relation of one and many, of concrete and abstract. |
"The poem goes from the poet’s gibberish to
The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.
Does it move to and fro or is it of both
At once?”
— Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" (1942)
Par exemple , the previous post's title: "Space Case."