Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has newly acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, literature, and related fields.
They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These newly available items will be on the TU Library shelves for the benefit of our students and ajarns. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.
Among them is a newly acquired book that should be useful to TU students who are interested in literature, American culture, poetry, modernism, and related subjects.
Poems by Wallace Stevens is a selection of writings by an American modernist poet who worked as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.
The TU Library collection includes other books by and about Wallace Stevens.
The literary critic Edmund Wilson once noted: Mr. Stevens is the master of a style: that is the most remarkable thing about him. His gift for combining words is baffling and fantastic but sure: even when you do not know what he is saying, you know that he is saying it well.
The University of Connecticus website observed:
Throughout his successful career as an insurance executive, Stevens was also quietly publishing poetry. Although his first book, Harmonium (1923), sold few copies, it is now recognized as a landmark in modern poetry. His reputation grew with each new volume and he finally he received numerous honors including the prestigious Bollingen Prize in Poetry. His Collected Poems (1954) won both a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
The principal theme of Stevens’ poetry is the value of imagination in human life. His poems exhibit a dazzling inventiveness and variety: from the elevated diction and stately rhythms of “Sunday Morning,” which critics have compared to Shakespeare or the great Romantic poets, to the inventive wordplay of “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” the bleak objectivity of “The Snow Man,” the meditative abstraction of “The Auroras of Autumn, and the transparent beauty of “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.” Critic Harold Bloom has called Stevens “a central American poet, the best and most representative of our time.”
In 1964, The University of Connecticut established its Wallace Stevens Program, sponsored by The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc., to celebrate Stevens’ achievement and legacy. Each year the program brings to Storrs and to Hartford a poet of national or international reputation. Visiting speakers have included Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, Stanley Kunitz, and Derek Walcott.
Here are some thoughts by Wallace Stevens from his writings, some of which are in the TU Library collection:
To be young is all there is in the world. The rest is nonsense — and cant. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it’s all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing…. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.
- Letter to his future wife Elsie Moll Kachel (1907); as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966)
How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.
- Letter to his future wife Elsie Moll Kachel (1907); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977)
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
- Letter (1935) as published in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966)
I am the angel of reality,
Seen for a moment standing in the door.
- “Angel Surrounded by Paysans” (1949)
I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite.
- As quoted in Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (2002)
I placed a jar in Tennessee
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose upon it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
[…]
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
- “Anecdote of the Jar”
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
- “The Snow Man”
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
- “The Emperor of Ice Cream”
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.
I
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”
[…]
XII
The blue guitar
And I are one.
I know that timid breathing. Where
Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentously declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.
[…]
XXII
Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and
To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is
An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.
But are these separate?
- The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)