| Colloquy with a Polish Aunt
Elle savait toutes les légendes du Paradis et tous les contes She How is it that my saints from Voragaine, He Old pantaloons, duenna of the spring! She Imagination is the will of things.... |
"Colloquy with a Polish Aunt" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium.It was first published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in October 1919, and is therefore in the public domain in the United States, according to Librivox.[1]
Revue des deux mondes (Journal of the Two Worlds) is a French language monthly literary and cultural affairs magazine that has been published in Paris since 1829. It was created in order to establish a cultural, economic and political bridge between France and the United States.[1] The quotation says, "She knew all the legends of Paradise and all the stories about Poland." The phrase "from Voragine" seems to be a reference to Verazze.[2]
Interpretation[]
Leading interpreters of Harmonium give Colloquya wide berth. Buttel omits it from his index catalog of the collection's poems. Bates steers clear of it similarly. The poem is a contribution to one of Stevens's major themes,[3] the relationship between imagination and reality. The poet's imaginative dream transforms the common drudge into women swathed in indigo, etc.
See also[]
- Anecdote of Canna
- Anecdote of the Jar
- Anecdote of Men by the Thousands
- Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks
- Banal Sojourn
- The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws
- Colloquy with a Polish Aunt
- The Cuban Doctor
- The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician
- The Emperor of Ice Cream
- Fabliau of Florida
- Gubbinal
- A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
- Homunculus et la Belle Etoile
- Of the Surface of Things
- Peter Quince at the Clavier
- The Place of the Solitaires
- Ploughing on Sunday
- The Snow Man
- Stars at Tallapoosa
- Sunday Morning
- Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
- The Weeping Burgher
References[]
- Bates, Milton J. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self. 1985: University of California Press.
- Buttel, Robert. Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium. 1967: Princeton University Press.
- Vendler, Helen. On Extended Wings. 1969: Harvard University Press.
Notes[]
- ↑ The Complete Public Domain Poems of Wallace Stevens, Volume 1, Librivox Forums. Web, Nov. 1, 2012.
- ↑ Jacobus de Voragine#cite note-0
- ↑ Vendler writes, "Some readers have seen his subject as an epistemological one, and have written about his views on the imagination and its uneasy rapport with reality. Others have seen his subject as a moral one, a justification of an aesthetic hedonism. Still others have seen his subject as a native humanist one, the quest of the American Adam for a Paradise in the wilderness." (3)
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