Re: your discussion about Stevens and winter: Being French, the last couplet of this poem rings very Mallarméan to me. I’m thinking in particular of « le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui », a sonnet that Edmund Wilson quoted in full in Axel’s Castle, his highly influential history of modernism (which Stevens might have read, though he might easily have come across Mallarmé’s poem elsewhere). Mallarmé’s poem depicts a frozen and motionless landscape—in which an exiled “swan of yesteryear” is condemned to the impossibility of flight—as the Ur-landscape of modern poetry: a space in which former Romantic symbols become frozen in splendid isolation and mutism. There is likewise a movement towards definition in “Man Carrying Thing”, a slow crystallization (despite resistance) through the night until we get to the bright obvious: the day, the frozen swan, the completed poem? The phrase “the bright obvious” with its nominalized adjective, also seems like a gallicism and sounds quite similar to “le bel aujourd’hui”.
(Note too that “la brune” is a word Mallarme uses several times (afternoon of a faun and other poems). Anthony
Re: your discussion about Stevens and winter: Being French, the last couplet of this poem rings very Mallarméan to me. I’m thinking in particular of « le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui », a sonnet that Edmund Wilson quoted in full in Axel’s Castle, his highly influential history of modernism (which Stevens might have read, though he might easily have come across Mallarmé’s poem elsewhere). Mallarmé’s poem depicts a frozen and motionless landscape—in which an exiled “swan of yesteryear” is condemned to the impossibility of flight—as the Ur-landscape of modern poetry: a space in which former Romantic symbols become frozen in splendid isolation and mutism. There is likewise a movement towards definition in “Man Carrying Thing”, a slow crystallization (despite resistance) through the night until we get to the bright obvious: the day, the frozen swan, the completed poem? The phrase “the bright obvious” with its nominalized adjective, also seems like a gallicism and sounds quite similar to “le bel aujourd’hui”.
(Note too that “la brune” is a word Mallarme uses several times (afternoon of a faun and other poems). Anthony