Stars at Tallapoosa
The lines are straight and swift between the stars.
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"Stars at Tallapoosa" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1922, so it is in the public domain in the United States.[1]
Commentary[]
It can be read as one of Stevens's poems about the transfiguring power of poetic imagination, which in this case need not accept the night of the dolorous criers, but instead find in it qualities, like a sheaf of brilliant arrows or the nimblest motions, that make it the delight of the secretive hunter.
Buttel finds this poem noteworthy for its connections to Whitman. Like Whitman, Stevens prized the lyical qualities of American place names and animal names, and the title of this poem is one of Buttel's examples.[2] He reads "Stars at Tallapoosa" as partly a refutation of Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" yet at the same time a variation on the mood and theme of that poem, even displaying some of Whitman's tone and manner, as in the lines about wading the sea-lines and mounting the earth-lines. Less brooding than Whitman's poem, "Stars at Tallapoosa" calls for an "active, imaginative transcendence over the blackness: in the mind's eye of his secretive hunter the intangible lines between the stars should become 'brilliant arrows' which will redeem his isolation."[3]
Eleanor Cook recommends comparing the argument of this poem with Stevens's "Palace of the Babies".[4]
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[]
- Buttel, Robert. Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium. 1967: Princeton University Press.
- Cook, Eleanor. A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens. 2007: Princeton University Press.
Notes[]
- ↑ Buttel, p. 227. See also Librivox and the Poetry web site.
- ↑ Buttel references Whitman's "Starting from Paumanok" to document this shared affinity:
The red aborigines,
Leaving natural breaths, sounds of rain and winds,
calls as of birds and animals in the woods,
syllabled to us for names,
Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa, Monongahela, Sauk,
Natchez, Chattahoochee.... - ↑ Buttel, p. 228
- ↑ Cook, p. 68