Or: Notes for the Metaphysical Club
Northrop Frye on Wallace Stevens:
"He… stands in contrast to the the dualistic
approach of Eliot, who so often speaks of poetry
as though it were an emotional and sensational
soul looking for a 'correlative' skeleton of
thought to be provided by a philosopher, a
Cartesian ghost trying to find a machine that
will fit."
Ralph Waldo Emerson on "vacant and vain" knowledge:
"The new position of the advancing man has all
the powers of the old, yet has them all new. It
carries in its bosom all the energies of the past,
yet is itself an exhalation of the morning. I cast
away in this new moment all my once hoarded
knowledge, as vacant and vain."
Harold Bloom on Emerson:
"Emerson may not have invented the American
Sublime, yet he took eternal possession of it."
Wallace Stevens on the American Sublime:
"And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space."
A founding member of the Metaphysical Club:
See also the eightfold cube.