Last night was the 16th Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash featuring Robert Pinsky reading the poetry of Wallace Stevens.
"The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm" was one of the poems Pinsky chose to discuss at length. Here are a few lines:
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
3 comments:
That's one of my all-time favorites. There's a beautiful discussion of it in an essay by Adrienne Rich, triggered by her hearing it on the radio once.
I'll have to find that essay. Do you know which book it's in off hand?
It's in the book "What Is Found There", right at the beginning.
(Only just figured out why I was not getting blog-comment emails, and solved the problem.)
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