Alan Olee Book Report

In honor of an admittedly rare for Phoenix cool and cloudy day, I submit this short poem by Wallace Stevens:

On the Manner of Addressing Clouds

Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,
Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,
Eliciting the still sustaining pomps
Of speech which are like music so profound
They seem an exaltation without sound.
Funest philosophers and ponderers,
Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
So speech of your processionals returns
In the casual evocations of your tread
Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These
Are the music of meet resignation; these
The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you
To magnify, if in that drifting waste
You are to be accompanied by more
Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Stevens

Although he was a somewhat straight-laced type, both times he met Robert Frost, he simply argued with him, violently, and speaking of violent behavior, the one time he met Ernest Hemingway, the two got into a fistfight.  Oh these poets!

Read more about his development as a poet here:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/wallace-stevens

And more about the Stevens / Hemingway free-style boxing match here:

https://www.ilab.org/eng/documentation/882-when_wallace_stevens_hit_ernest_hemingway_in_key_west.html