Finished Winesburg, Ohio. I love that book.

Still reading Eleanor Cook's great book on Wallace Stevens (Wallace Stevens : Poetry, Word-Play and Word-War). On "The Man with the Blue Guitar", she quotes the final canto:

XXXIII

 
That generation's dream, aviled
In the mud, in Monday's dirty light,

 
That's it, the only dream they knew,
Time in its final block, not time

 
To come, a wrangling of two dreams.
Here is the bread of time to come,

 
Here is its actual stone. The bread 
Will be our bread, the stone will be

 
Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except

 
The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

"The imagined jay" - jumped out at me. I've been imagining J-jay in many a way, for a while.

Eleanor Cook's deeply-learned book (Wallace Stevens : Poetry, Word-Play and Word-War) shows just how much someone with wide reading and a talent for hearing echos & constructions can discover.

& she shows that Helen Vendler & other critics were right to see Stevens as the central American answer to, & inheritor of, the main stream of English poetry.

America's "colonial" status, the long literary rivalry between England & "these states", has meant that Americans are in the (adolescent) position of having both to re-invent the wheel, and to follow their (English) forebears, at the same time. This causes all kinds of Oedipal exaggerations & generational nightmares.

Cook shows just how steeped in Milton & Keats & Shakespeare et al. Stevens is; how they inform the elegant subtleties of poem after poem. But was he a neo-Anglican epigone? I don't think so, Jack.

Reading : Poetry, word-play and word-war in Wallace Stevens, by Eleanor Cook. "Poetry is the scholar's art," he sd. Some of the semantic/rhetorical complexity she uncovers is astonishing, daunting.

Riddles, proverbs, charms. Poetry, in part, a burning-off, a paring-down, an escape from casual speech, cliches. "the firecat bristles in the way".

(Whereas po-biz acts like a miniscule sub-category of sho-biz.)

btw, interesting articles on Mayan glyphs in Times science section today.