Parfait Martinique: coffee mousse, rum on top, a little cream on top of that.

While I did end up liking the poetry reading for Wednesday (it took some getting used to), these quotes strike me as pretty strange. I would infer that the repetition is to accentuate some of his points, but I think there are more effective ways of doing that. Anyway...onto my post:

After reading Wallace Steven's Adagia, it is clear that he has not only found a replacement for religion in poetry--"After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption"--but holds the belief that his poetry is more important than any individual's religious beliefs--"Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art." He goes on to replace the idea of God expressed by many "believers" that God is everywhere and in everything by saying that, "there is no difference between god and his temple" and then asserting that, among many other things, "money is a kind of poetry."

Stevens uses this slow build up to construct the supporting structure for his pending argument; "God is a symbol for something that can as well take other forms, as, for example, the form of high poetry." Stevens is mesmerized by the power of poetry, and how he believes that "Poetry is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life."

(I am actually sitting here thinking: "Yeah... that is what he says Oliver... what is your point?" And I guess I really don't have one except that reading this is extraordinarily frustrating.) Stevens says things like...
"God is a postulate of the ego." and then (withing one page) says that: "God is in my or else is not at all (does not exist)." All this makes me think is that when/if Stevens ever believed in God it was in an attempt to assert his self-importance, and it is ridiculous for him to assume that his perverted motives have any relation to the faith held by over 1/2 the world today. He is the obsessed with his own self-importance and has an insatiable hunger for personal exaltation. At first I agreed with Noel in that I wasn't particularly fond of Steven's poetry, but I suffered through it to try and extract his reasons for writing--if I had to do it again, I would have gone with my gut instinct and pitched it. He believes that poetry is everything good in this world, simply because he is a poet--and he doesn't care if other people have other "callings" (to borrow from Weber). Ok. I think I will stop here. Just to summarize: Wallace Steven's is self-absorbed and ignorant of the value of other aspects of life (outside of poetry), and is so caught up in his own head that he truly believes that his path is the only path worth pursuing. In my opinion he is worse (more intolerant, etc.) than some of the most conservative Christians I know.