A Few More Notes on Poetry: Hallfred's Saga and Wallace Stevens

I came late to the realization that poetry is what matters most. I lived fully immersed in the era so well picked out by Walter Benjamin, das prosaische Zeitalter, and so I filled up my free time with novels: sentence after descriptive sentence, telling a story that read like a movie.

Nowadays, however, it's either primary or secondary literature either more or less connected with what in my line of work is called the 'AOS'; or it is poetry.

I would like to mention two very different poets I have been reading recently. The first of them is anonymous.

Now let me begin by saying I would be the first to bemoan the Christianization of Scandinavia. Had it not happened so early on, we would have had indigeneous, European pagans, with pagan religion and pagan customs, to marvel at and to study. What we have instead are a few properly pagan rune stones, but mostly just descriptions of the pagan era from the high period of medieval Scandinavian literature, which occurred already a couple of centuries after the mass conversion.

However, I have to admit that this renunciation of Odinism from the 10th-century Hallfred's Saga is one of the most beautiful accounts of conversion I have come across:

It's the creed of the sovereign
of Sogn, to ban sacrifices.
We must renounce many
a long-held decree of Norns.
All mankind casts Odin's words
to the winds. Now I am forced
to foresake Freyja's kin
and pray to Christ.

*

The other poet I wanted to mention is Wallace Stevens. I had recently been mentioning to people whose tastes I respect (more or less) that I was enjoying going back to T. S. Eliot after many years, in particular to The Waste Land, which seems to me to be tinged with the occult in just the way modernist poetry ought to be: enriched by the Tarot and by chants of shanti in the same way that Rilke's poetry is enriched by angels. Enriched without existential commitment.  

But whenever I mentioned Eliot, I would hear in response something like: I'm more of a Wallace Stevens man myself. (As if we were talking about the Yankees and the Mets!) I had never read Wallace Stevens, and I didn't understand why he and Eliot were being juxtaposed in this way. Now I have read Stevens, and I still don't understand.

But anyway, for the most part I remain more of an Eliot man. Stevens is modern, but he is modern not so much like Bauhaus as like the Hartford Indemnity Co., where he spent his entire career. I almost feel like I could have guessed his place of employment, without having read anything of his biography, simply from the quality of the verses. There are, in particular, all the trips to Florida, which was not as awful in the early 20th century as it is now; but which was, if I may put it this way, already devoid of any qualities that might have set the poetic imaginations of Eliot, Auden, or Pound afire. Perhaps Ogden Nash could have come up with a clever rhyme about alligators.

Most of the time, his poems, like insurance forms, fail to hook me. There are a few exceptions, however, where, as if in spite of himself, an image floats up from the midst of a sea of un-followable words and strikes me, hard. This, for example, from "The Man with the Blue Guitar" of 1937:

Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?

Maybe it's the rhyme scheme manqué, the fact that if 'wine' and 'blood' had been reversed we would have had a pleasing, Nash-worthy rhyme. Or maybe it's that the question hits so close to home.

Stevens's grasp of French is so-so. He likes puerile onomatopoeia ('tum-ti tum-tum', and so on), and for some reason strongly prefers the sun to the moon. Much of the poetry is about poetry, and often what he takes poetry to be for remains, after reading, strange to me.

There is one striking exception: 'Men Made Out of Words', of whose year of composition I am uncertain:

What should we be without the sexual myth,
The human revery or poem of death?

Castratos of moon-mash--Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human

Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,

By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.

The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.

This poem seem to explain how an insurance salesman in Hartford, Connecticut, who likes nothing more than his vacations in Florida, might nonetheless be a poet; and at the same time how I, in spite of the fact that nothing really happens in my life anymore, that in an important sense all experiences have been played out already, and from this point on it all really just amounts to management-- how I, in such a condition, could nonetheless come to believe that poetry is what matters most.

--

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Comments

[Laura]

"When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?"
— Robert Bringhurst

[Justin]

It seems to me some combination of snobby/romantic/naive to think that where one works, or vacations, - mundane Florida or haunting, ancient Europe - should have anything to do with one's capacities as a poet. From what you write it sounds a bit like you've let your ideas of a poetic life justify the fact that the poems don't click with you. I'm not trying to be snarky here, but, if you can't see that great poetry could come out of Florida or a career in in an insurance Co. I can't help imagining that you are more into the idea of poetry than the thing itself.

[Justin E. H. Smith]

Justin (another Justin, not me!): The idea of poetry's pretty good too. Though I'm not sure Stevens would distinguish between poetry and its idea. He might be accused, as Auden somewhere was, of taking poetry to be made out of poetry, rather than 'out of being alive'. But that's just the kind of poetry I like most (pace Bringhurst), and I'm only critical of Stevens to the extent that, as I see it, he allowed the particular way in which he lived to shine through in his work. --JEHS

[ombhurbhuva]

Your post reminded my of Matthew Arnold's remark about Thomas Gray Gray, a born poet, fell upon an age of prose(Essays in Criticism). Arnold's own poetry might be of interest to you - The Scholar Gypsy, The Buried Life, Dover Beach, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse. You likely know of them already.

Not as their friend or child I speak!
But as on some far northern strand,
Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek
In pity and mournful awe might stand
Before some fallen Runic stone -
For both were faiths, and both are gone.

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride;
I come to shed them at their side.

(from Stanzas..)

[Erik Halldor Justin Smith]

What an exceptionally pretentious, douchey, useless and self-involved yarn Justin Smith and his blog are.

Most especially, I love how he shoves the "E.H." in your face so that he can make up for his insecurities about the common quality of his name.

[J. F. Geldman]

I really wish there was an upvote button so I could abuse it on the above post.

[Erik J.H. Halldor]

What do you expect from a person whose entire life is about aesthetics? Justin is a little golden egg, painting itself with beautiful patterns to mask a completely rotten inside.

Hey Halldor, I'm sure you could just get your name legally changed to Erik J.H. Halldor and be done with it.

[Jeremiah]

Let's hope that this is true: "nothing really happens in my life anymore, that in an important sense all experiences have been played out already, and from this point on it all really just amounts to management."

Perhaps I lack management skills, but it seems to me that every five years or so I can find a new crisis to live through or die of.