From Class

mise en abyme - "placed into abyss"
     infinity?

Stand between two mirrors.
     Get lost in yourself

"Believe without belief, beyond belief." - Stevens

Respond to somebody else's blog in your blog!

"Incantation"

Memorize the entirety of "The Idea of Order at Key West"

"Your (final) project should communicate to us that you have made a discovery... It should make you go 'Oh!' or 'Ah!'" - Dr. Sexson

Themes in TIoOaKW?

Literary Criticism - The Mirror and the Lamp by M. H. Abrams

"The Man With the Blue Guitar" - Stevens


Four items in every work of art:
1) The work itself. (New Criticism)
2) The artist.
3) What the art is about.
4) The audience.

Stevens gives us two forms of literary criticism in TIoOaKW.

D: Mimesis
     "imitation"
     "mimic" in TIoOaKW

Plato -
Pen (as a work of art):

Representation of facsimile

Plato's theory of eternal form

D: Poiesis
     "creation"

Kenosis versus pleurosis (pleroma?)

HW: Open up your Stevens book at random and answer the question "What am I reading about?", the real subject matter. Poetry itself.

From Class

1Q84

"How do you know what you think until you see what you say?" - Sexson

Joseph Anton: A Memoir - Rushdie

The Idea of Order at Key West

From Class

Farewell to Florida

Friar Barron's commentary on The Swerve

Quotation by Wallace Stevens

Ode on a Grecian Urn
     "...Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter..."

The Idea of Order at Key West

Four items in every work of art:
1) The work itself.
2) The artist.
3) What the art is about.
4) The audience.

From Class

"In an age of disbelief, or, what is the same thing, in a time that is largely humanistic, in one sense or another, it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief, in his measure and in his style... I think of it as a role of the utmost seriousness. It is, for one thing, a spiritual role... To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences... It was as if they had never inhabited the earth. There was no crying out for their return. They were not forgotten because they had been part of the glory of the earth." (Stevens)

Walter Ong - Orality and Literacy

Stevens - Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

From Class

The full video with Susan Howe saying she wants our class Bible buried with her:

The Emperor of Ice Cream

Hemmingway – A Clean Well Lighted Place
     (Just for fun.)

Alexander Calder creations:

Read Dusty's Blog

Sunday Morning

Angels and Devils:

Backstories due on your blog by Monday!

From Class

Stevens Sked Final 2

Memorize assigned poem

"There words are chosen out of their desire" - from A Primitive Like an Orb - Wallace Stevens

List of quotes Dr. Sexson recited to his granddaughter:

• A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
• The Snow Man

Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage

Study of Two Pears

A Postcard From The Volcano

The Motive for Metaphor

In a Station of the Metro

Greenblatt - Highlights from Chapter 8.

• Everything is made of invisible particles.
• "... the ceaseless mutation of forms composed of indestructible substances–'the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon.'"
• The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size.
• All particles are in motion in an infinite void.
• The universe has no creator or designer.
• Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve.
• "...declinatio, inclinatio, or clinamen–is only the most minimal of motions, nec plus quam minimum."
• "...declination, inclination, or slope–is only the most minimal of motions, no more than the least." (Google Translate)
• The swerve is the source of free will.
• Nature ceaselessly experiments.
• The universe was not created for or about humans.
• Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival.
• The soul dies.
• There is no afterlife.
• Death is nothing to us.
• All organized religions are superstitious delusions.
• Religions are invariably cruel.
• There are no angels, demons, or ghosts.
• The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.
• The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
• Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder.