Review of Wallace Stevens’ “The Relations between Poetry and Painting" (Essay Sample)

Instructions:

Description
read " The Relations between Poetry and Painting" Wallace Stevens" and respond according to the following template
Poetry Response Paper Template

(1-2 pp.)

Author, Poem, Date (written or published)

Subject/Theme

What is the poem about? (What does it describe or narrate? What is its theme?)

Form/Language

What strikes you about the structure and uses of language? What is their effect? (Why this way and not some other?)

Possible considerations (not a checklist!):
§ speaker/poetic voice
§ narrative/dramatic situation
§ mood and tone
§ imagery and symbolism
§ structure [genre (sonnet, villanelle, etc.), lineation]
§ sonics [meter, rhythm, rhyme, other sound effects—alliteration, assonance, consonance]
§ style [diction, syntax]
§ figuration and connotative devices [tropes (metaphor, simile, synecdoche, metonymy), schemes (anaphora, chiasmus, antithesis), allusion]

Meaning/Intention

What is the poem doing (arguing, expressing, enacting)? Does it “work”?

Questions/Additional Thoughts (2-3)

(This can include questions or observations about the relation between the poem and Stevens’ essays and other poetry.)

L. Atnip
Rev. 1/8/2019
From Stevens:

[There] is a universal poetry that is reflected in everything…an unascertained and fundamental aesthetic, or order, of which poetry and painting are manifestations. (CPP, 740)

To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of great power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing. Since we have always shared all things with them and have always had a part of their strength and, certainly, all of their knowledge, we shared likewise this experience of annihilation. It was their annihilation, not ours, and yet it left us feeling in a measure, we, too, had been annihilated. It left is feeling dispossessed and alone in solitude, like children without parents, in a home that seemed deserted, in which the amical rooms and halls had taken on a look of hardness and emptiness. (Opus Posthumous, 206)

Life / Consists of propositions about life. (“Men Made Out of Words”)

It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self. (“Description Without Place”)

On Stevens:

Stevens returns almost obsessively to a vision of the world that is untouched by human feeling, a world in which the otherness of the world grows not only stark but oddly compelling. (James Longenbach, 113)

…the central issue for [Stevens]…is whether the world contains a teleological principle that would give shape and meaning to the spectacle of phenomenal change. (Malcolm Woodward, Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode, 250)

Stevens aimed constantly at a stylization of his subject . . . He aimed as well at an aesthetic distance proper to reflective meditation, and at what he called the gaiety of language, a diction freed from the prosaic obligation to be transparent, liberated into the holiday of expressive form. He undertook the great metaphysical subjects of the constructed nature of phenomenological reality and the necessary historical exhaustion of all cultural and erotic forms. He proposed, and exhibited, the symbolic, rhetorical, and prosodic independence of American poetry form British models; and he left a memorable record of a single inner life in this century, one extending form youth to old age, full of clarity and sobriety of vision, equally full of expression at once extravagant, buoyant, and austere. (Helen Vendler, “Wallace Stevens,” in Voices and Visions, pp. 154-55)

source..

Content:

Student’s Name
Professor’s Name
Course
Date
Review of Wallace Stevens’ “The Relations between Poetry and Painting"
"The Relations between Poetry and Painting" by Wallace Stevens is a 1951 writing that explores the intersection between poetry and painting as art forms. Generally, the text is a comparative form of literature that juxtaposes poetry and painting, especially on the idea that most of them develop from the surrounding environment, landscape, and social happenings; however, one chooses to use paint while the other goes for words. The author gives examples of artistic works in poetry and paintings by but not limited to Baudelaire, Virgilian landscape, Claude, Shakespeare, and biblical women (Stevens 740). Therefore, despite borrowing from similar foundations, poetry and paintings present art in diverse ways that mostly depend on the eye of the authors and their perspectives.
The writing takes the form of a continuous narration structure while contrast and juxtaposition remain the main styles, and it strikes the audience from the beginning. For instance, Stevens compares contemporary and traditional art, stating that modern art is uncompromising and bigoted (Stevens 745). The contrast proceeds and is evident where Stevens records De Goncourts' statement saying that modern art resembles modern politics and expresses bigotry, especially since it inclines towards gender among other interests, as in women's rights and dressing (Stevens 745). Again, Stevens likens poetry and painting, stating that a painter first becomes a poet before becoming a painter, which he refers to as multifold value (Stevens 741). Therefore, Stevens develops the similarities and differences between the two forms of art from juxtaposing paintings and poetry.
The writing tone changes from one part to the other, but Stevens majorly maintains a critical tone. He carefully analyses paintings and poems from the past and the present, recording their differences and similarities, commenting on their shortcomings. For instance, Stevens remains critical of the idea that people find meaning in painting, which Stevens maintains is just an art that does not have to make sense and have meaning to everyone. For instance, when he talks of Quatremere De Quincy, he maintains that the differences the archeologist and architectural theorist between paintings and poems made from the same landscapes or contents differed due to imitation and not varying interpretations (Stevens 747). Thus, critically looking at these aspects drives the tone of his writing.
Besides, Stevens employs historical allusion in writing, specifically the French classism era of the seventeenth century. Stevens compares the paintings done by Poussin and Claude to the poetry works done by Shakespeare of the Racine generation (Stevens 749). From his analy

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Review of Wallace Stevens’ “The Relations between Poetry and Painting" (Essay Sample)

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