People
Personages
Personae
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Annotation
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Ackermann
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[Lavery]
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Alpha
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In
the sixth section of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” from Auroras
of Autumn, Stevens writes that “Reality is the beginning not the
end, / Naked Alpha” (400). Alpha,
then, is reality as the beginning of all things, not, as some believe, the
end of all things. Stevens
further describes Alpha as “the infant A standing on infant legs,”
which seems to show the frailty and innocence of the fresh reality.
He also states that “Alpha fears men or else Omega’s men / Or
else his prolongations of the human” (400).
This line implies that the Alpha character fears those who believe
reality to be the end of all things instead of correctly believing that it
is the beginning of all things. Finally,
Stevens writes that “Alpha continues to begin” (400), implying the
regeneration or recreation of reality with the imagination, a classic
theme in Stevens’s poetry. [Atkins]
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Anacharsis
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(600
BC) a Scythian philosopher who was entrusted with an embassy to Athens.
He was granted citizenship to Athens and was regarded as one of the
Seven Sages. He would often
travel foreign lands as well as the Greek countryside in quest for
knowledge which he would share upon his return to Athens.
He is, perhaps, most noted for comparing laws to spider webs- they
catch small flys but allow bigger ones to escape.
In Stevens' From the Packet of Anacharsis (CPP 317), Anacharsis is
found recalling lines that he had written near Athens. [Brigati]
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Ananke
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In
classical mythology, the personification of necessity. Alluded to in
“Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery.” [Lavery]
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Apollinaire,
Guillume
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(1880-1918)
A French poet whose original name was Wilhelm Apollinaris de
Kostrowitzki. [Crum]
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Arabian, An
(in my room)
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An
Arabian (in my room) from NSF is identified by Stevens in LWS #469 as the
moon. It intrudes into the
personal realm seeming to reveal meaning with its “damned
hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how” and its “primitive astronomy.” As one
example of “Life’s
nonsense,” it is merely a natural event that only seems to hold a
“strange relation.” [Haynes]
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Ariel
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In
Shakespeare's The Tempest Ariel was a fairy spirit who did the bidding of
Prospero. In "The Planet on the Table," a poem written in
response to the publication (in 1954) of Stevens' Collected Poems, Ariel,
we are told, "was glad he had written his poems" (450). Stevens,
then, is writing about himself in a fictional third person persona; Arial
= Stevens. [Lavery]
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Aristotle
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Aristotle
was a Greek philosopher who believed that human beings’ most important
purpose was to serve and improve humankind by emphasizing theory rather
than logic. Stevens mentions
Aristotle in “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit” (CP 288) by saying
if there must be a god in the house, let him move as if he is
Aristotle’s skeleton (among other examples). The images which Stevens
gives in this poem make it quite anti-religious; if there must be a god,
he cannot be active in our lives or a being capable of significant action,
such as a skeleton or a ghost. However, because the skeleton is Aristotle’s, it has some
far away important influence, but at the same time, Aristotle is a figure
of the past. [O’Neal] Esthétique
du Mal
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Ayer, A. J.
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(1910-89).
British analytic philosopher, professor at Oxford and the University of
London, author of Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), and a key figure in
the development of linguistic
analysis. [Lavery]
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B.
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B. is representative of all the great composers with last
names that begin with the letter “B," such as Bach, Beethoven,
Bruckner, Berlioz, and Brahms. "B." is in part four of
“Esthetique du Mal": “When
B. sat down at the piano and made / A transparence in which we hear music,
made music” (279). Esthétique
du Mal [Regensburg]
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Back-Ache,
The
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Personified
as the child of Saint John in Stevens' poem "Saint John and the
Back-Ache," the Back-Ache utters the opening lines that begin a
dialogue with Saint John. His
is the voice of reason closed-off from experience.
His view of existence is antithetical to that of Saint John, who
champions a position of sensuality over rationality. [Rhodes]
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Badroulbadour
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[Lavery]
The Worms at Heaven's Gate
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Balzac,
Honore de
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(1799-1850).
French novelist and short story writer, author of "The Human
Comedy," a twenty year enterprise in which he sought to offer a
comprehensive portrait of his time. Best known for Père Goriot (1835) and
Cousin Bette (1847).
[Lavery]
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Basilewsky
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Stevens’s
“Owl’s Clover: A Duck for Dinner” (581-86) argues that imagination
cannot thrive under communism (social regimentation).
In Section IV (584-85), Basilewsky, playing his “Concerto for
Airplane and Pianoforte” (2), provides one example of the negative
impact of communism [“The newest Soviet réclame” (3)] on artistic
production, specifically music: “Basilewsky’s
bulged before it floated, turned / Caramel and would not, could not
float” (26-27). [Wright]
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Bateson,
William
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(1861-1926).
British biologist, one of the first to apply Mendelian genetics to the
understanding of evolution. [Lavery]
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Baudelaire,
Charles
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[1821-67].
Major French symbolist poet, author of The Flowers of Evil (1857). [Lavery]
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Bawda
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Bawda
is a fictional character, a maiden, in the long Stevens poem “Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction.” She
appears in the fourth section of the poem, which deals with her marriage
to a “great captain” in Catawba.
The poem tells us that Bawda “loved the captain as she loved the
sun” (347), and he loved her as well as the place of their marriage.
It seems as if Stevens gives the maiden this name because it rhymes
with Catawba. This seems
fitting because, in this poem, Stevens writes that “They [Bawda and her
captain] married well because the marriage-place / Was what they loved.
It was neither heaven nor hell” (347). Naming the maiden Bawda associates her more closely with
the marriage place that was so well loved, and, therefore, makes it clear
that Bawda, too, was well loved by her captain. [Atkins]
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Belle
Scavoir
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Bouquet
of Belle Scavoir
Belle
Scavoir represents nature, and the bouquet and all of its contents are
merely derivative of nature. "It
is she [Belle Scavoir/ nature] alone that matters./ She made it." [Brigati]
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Belshazzar
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Biblical
son of Nebuschdnezzar, Babylon's last king. Alluded to in Country Words [Lavery]
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Bergson,
Henri
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(1859-1941).
Nobel Prize (in literature)-winning French philosopher, author of Matter
and Memory (1896; trans. 1911), Laughter (1900; trans. 1901), and Creative
Evolution (1907; trans. 1911). [Lavery]
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Bernard,
Emile
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[1868
- 1941]. French painter, known for his illustrations for literary works. [Lavery]
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Berserk
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Berserk
is the fictional character with whom the speaker of “Anecdote of the
Prince of Peacocks” has a conversation while walking through the night.
The speaker describes Berserk as “sharp,” “red,” and
“sun-colored” and asks Berserk why he is the way he is.
Berserk replies, “You that wander […] On the bushy plain, /
Forget so soon. / But I set my traps / In the midst of dreams” (46).
Berserk reminds the traveler that things, be it Berserk, the plain,
the moonlight, simply are. The
speaker says that “I knew the dread / Of the bushy plain, / And the
beauty / Of the moonlight” (46). This
seems to imply that the speaker realizes that the meanings he has placed
in these things have been merely the misdevotions of a foolish man. [Atkins]
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Bird with the
Coppery Keen Claws, The
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Represented
by the parakeet in Stevens' poem of this name (CPP 65).
The parakeet lives a life more in harmony with nature and in the
present in that it does not subscribe to or "undulate" with
"pure intellect" and apply "its laws" like humans.
To Stevens, the bird is without pretense and is able to live in the
moment and within nature free of supposition. [Brigati]
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Blanche
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A
designation for the moon in "The Man on the Dump." [Lavery]
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Blandina
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Blandina is a young girl who
appears in “Analysis of a Theme.”
The poem opens with the “theme” in which the speaker remembers
how happy he/she was telling “the young Blandina of three-legged
giraffes” (304). The
remainder of the poem is an analysis of this theme, an analysis of the
joys of imagination. [Crum]
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Blue Woman,
The
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This
is a character from the poem "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction."
She is described as looking out her window, "linked and
lacquered," perhaps with reference to wearing heavy jewelry and being
inebriated. She does not like what she sees and wishes the world to be
different. She wants it to appear more like her own memory. From her
window, she "named/ the corals of the dogwood." Her naming is
"coldly delineating" and "except for the eye, without
intrusion." Apart from what she sees from her window, what she tries
to own by naming, she is coldly detached from the world outside. [Haynes]
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Bonnie and
Josie
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These
two female characters (Stevens does not mention their ages) appear in his
poem “Life is Motion” (65). The
poem is set in Oklahoma, and Bonnie and Josie act as stereotypical Native
Americans as the dance around a stump, “[crying] ‘Ohoyaho, Ohoo. .
.” Bonnie and Josie revel in the very presence of nature. [O’Neal]
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Botantist on
Alp
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Earning
the title of two of his poems, both "Botanist on Alp (No. 1)"
and "Botanist on Alp (No. 2)" praise the art of poetry. To the
botanist, one who studies plants, the "Panoramas are not what they
used to be" (109). Nature and the way one views nature changed. By
using nature as a means of salvation, "Marx has ruined Nature,"
(109). The botanist knows the ideal world is non-existent. In "(No.
2)," Stevens states the necessity of poetry: "For who could
tolerate the earth / Without that poem, or without" (110). [Regensburg]
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Boucher
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An
18th century French painter whose depictions of mythological deities were
conveyed with a whimsy and playfulness that was true to the Rococo style.
Stevens mentions him in "Asides on the Oboe" as having
extinguished gods, likely interpreting Boucher's irreverence toward the
deities as symbolic of his own desire to view the world as free of gods.
[Rhodes]
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Bowl
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[Lavery]
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Bradley, F.
H.
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F.
H. Bradley (1846-1924). Absolute idealist British philosopher. His best
known work was Appearance and Reality (1924). [Lavery]
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Brahms
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(1833-1897),
German composer and pianist of the second half of the 19th century. A master of symphonic and sonata style, Brahms tried to
preserve the Classical tradition in a period when its standards were being
questioned or overturned by the Romantics.
In “Anglais Mort à Florence,” Brahms represents the lack of
imagination in that the Englishman enjoys the music of Brahms in a
passive, emotional way rather than as a scholar of musical form or
technique: “Music began to fail him.
Brahms, although / His dark familiar, often walked apart” (CPP
119, ll. 2-3). Furthermore, Brahms represents a dependence on tradition as
the Englishman’s vitality fades: “He used his reason, exercised his
will, / Turning in time to Brahms as alternate / In speech. He was that music and himself. […] / But he remembered
the time when he stood alone” (CPP 120, ll. 14-18).
[Wright]
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Braque,
Georges
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[1882-1963].
French cubist painter, a close friend of Picasso's. [Lavery]
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Brave Man,
The
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The
Brave Man is the term Stevens uses to describe the sun in his poem “The
Brave Man.” The sun, or the
Brave Man, makes “Green gloomy eyes / In dark forms of the grass / Run
away” (112). He also makes
“Fears of my bed, / Fears of life and fears of death, / Run away”
(112). The Brave Man takes on
all of these things and seems to be victorious, at least during the
daytime. Finally, Stevens
says that the Brave Man “comes up / From below and walks without
meditation” (112). “Walking
with meditation” implies the dependability and constant motion of the
sun: the sun never tarries, and it always continues on its path. [Atkins]
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Bridges,
Robert
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[1844-1930].
English poet, best known for The Testament of Beauty (1929) and his role
in establishing the work of his friend Gerard Manley Hopkins. [Lavery]
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Bronze Man,
The
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A
recurring idea which surfaces in Stevens' works. In This Solitude of
Cataracts (366), Stevens writes, "To be a bronze man breathing under
archaic lapsis," and in An Ordinary Evening in New Haven (403), he
also addresses the bronze man by writing, "We are not men of bronze
and we are not dead." For
Stevens, the bronze man represents the symbolic or statuesque which he
detests as they represent the idealized, antiquated and conventional, in
contrast with the major men who are beyond reality, yet composed thereof. [Brigati]
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Broomstick
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[Lavery]
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Bunyan, John
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[1628-88].
English author of Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666),
Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come (1678, 1684),
and other works. [Lavery]
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Burckhardt,
Jakob
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(1818-97).
Swiss cultural historian, friend of the philosopher Nietzsche, best known
for Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). [Lavery]
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Burgers of
Petty Death
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A
burgher is an inhabitant of a town, an ordinary citizen.
In “Burghers of Petty Death” the burghers are a man and a
woman, the “small townsmen of death” who await death “like two
leaves that keep clinging to a tree” (315).
The “petty death” the couple awaits is “a death of great
height and depth, covering all surfaces, filling the mind” (315).
Likewise, this death is “without any feeling, an imperium of
quiet, in which a wasted figure, with an instrument, propounds blank final
music” (315). It is hard to
discern what the speaker means by death in the poem, but it is most likely
something different than literal death—possibly spiritual or
intellectual death. For a
similar use of the word burgher in Stevens, see Weeping Burgher, The. [Crum]
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Burke,
Kenneth
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(1897-1993).
Controversial, unclassifiable American literary theorist and rhetorician,
most famous for books like The Philosophy of Literary Form, The Grammar of
Motives, and Language as Symbolic Action. [Lavery]
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Burnshaw,
Stanley
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(1906-
). American poet and critic, author of The Seamless Web:
Language-Thinking, Creature-Knowledge, Art-Experience (1970). [Lavery]
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Byzantines
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Byzantines
were citizens of Byzantium, an empire that lasting roughly a thousand
years that had its roots in the Eastern Roman Empire and whose capital is
modern Istanbul, Turkey. In “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” the
Byzantines appear “like the noise of tambourines” as attendants in the
Old Testament apocrypha story Susanna and the elders.
While the Byzantines whisper among themselves as to why Susanna has
“cried against the elders,” their lamps reveal “Susanna’s shame”
and they flee, expressing the same confused musical tones.
Following the trope of music already established in the poem, the
percussive quality of the tambourines, especially coming immediately after
the cymbal clash of Susanna’s discovery of being spied upon, expresses
both confusion and fear. Stevens’
notes in LWS #279 that to stumble over the factual anacronism of placing
“Byzantines” in the story is “a bit of precious pedantry.” [Haynes]
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Candide
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This
character in “The Comedian as the Letter C” (22) is a direct reference
to Voltaire’s novel Candide. The
protagonist of the novel, Candide, is a good-hearted but hopelessly naïve
young man. His mentor, Pangloss, teaches him that his family’s world is
"the best of all possible worlds." After being banished from his
adopted childhood home, Candide travels the world and meets with a wide
variety of misfortunes, all the while pursuing security and following his
cousin, Cunégonde, the woman he loves. His faith in Pangloss's undiluted
optimism is repeatedly tested. Stevens
describes Candide as “Yeoman and grub, but with a fig in sight,” much
like his protagonist Crispin who has encountered misfortune at the loss of
whatever poetic capability he once possessed.
At the mention of
Candide in the poem, though, Crispin tries to be optimistic that his
talent will return after his mind has been blown by the sea. [O’Neal]
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Canon
Aspirin, The
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Canon Aspirin is a character in "Notes Toward a
Supreme Fiction" (329-352). Canon reaches a point "Beyond which
thought could not progress as thought" (348). He loses all hope for
imagination. He is concerned with his sister's children, and in regards to
reality and imagination, "He chose to include the things / That in
each other are included, the whole, / The complicate, the amassing
harmony" (348). Sukenick explains in Musing the Obscure that Canon
chooses both because "thought is based on the fact of reality, and
our view of that fact is affected by our thought" (156).[Regensburg]
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Canon
Aspirin’s Sister
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Mentioned
in Section Five, under the topic of "It Must Give Pleasure," in
"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," Canon Aspirin's Sister is a
sensible woman. According to
Canon Aspirin, this approach to life produces happiness. She is widowed and lives with her two young daughters.
She is not idealistic about her children and perceives them
realistically, knowing her high estimation of them far exceeds anyone
else's. Living simply and
realistically, she provides a contrast to her brother, who dreams up a
"fugue/Of praise" for her. [Rhodes]
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Captain,
The
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[Lavery]
Life on a Battleship
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Carlos Among
the Candles
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“Carlos
Among the Candles” is the title (only) character of the play of the same
name (615-620). Because he is
described as “an eccentric pedant of about forty” who “speaks in a
lively manner, but is over-nice in sounding his words” (615), Carlos is
believed to be a self-caricature of Wallace Stevens.
Carlos, by lighting and extinguishing candles one at a time, acts
out the play’s intention “to illustrate the theory that people are
affected by what is around them. […] Take, for example, (instead of a
mountain or of a morgue), a single candle.
If this is true of a single candle, then it is possible to trace
variations of effect by varying the number of candles” (Letters 201).
[Wright]
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Carpenter,
This
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[Atkins]
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Cassirer,
Ernst
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(1874-1945).
German philosopher, author of such works as The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms (1923-1929) and An Essay on Man (1945). [Lavery]
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Cat
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In
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven (CPP 397), the Cat thinks the whole world
exits for them and does not necessarily realize they are merely a part in
it. Similarly, in Someone Puts a Pineapple Together (CPP 693), the
descriptions of the imagery are regarded to be to Cat's taste, suggesting
the assumption that their environment revolves around them.
A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts (CPP 190), gives the reader a
similar image of the "Fat cat" or one who represents false
heroics, but here the cat is in the shadows of the rabbit "king"
and appears to be a small player in the world of the rabbit, thus,
reinforcing that all beings play a role in nature. [Brigati]
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Cervantes,
Miguel de
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(1547-1616).
Spanish novelist, dramatist, and poet, whose masterpiece was Don Quixote
de la Mancha (1605), a book he wrote while in prison. [Lavery]
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Chatueaubriand
|
[1768-1848].
Prominent French Romantic literary figure, author of The Genius of
Christianity (1802), René (1805), Memoirs from beyond the Tomb (1849-50),
and other works. [Lavery]
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Chieftain
Iffucan
|
Bantams
in Pine-Woods
|
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Church, Henry
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[Lavery]
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Claude
|
Claude
Lorrain was a landscape painter (1600-1682) much admired in eighteenth
century England. His admirers
sought to recreate in their own gardens, his ideal panoramas, often
introducing classical architectural “ruins” and “temples” to
enhance the effect. Stevens’s
poem, “Botanist on Alp (No.1)” (p. 108), states that, “Claude has
been dead a long time.” For
Stevens, the idealized world connoted by the term “Claude,” is
artificial and obsolete. The poem points out that in reality, the
“pillars are prostrate, the arches haggard.” [Haynes]
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Clementina,
Victoria
|
Victoria
appears in one of Stevens’s character sketch poems, “Exposition of the
Contents of a Cab” (CP 52). Victoria
is an African American lady who “Took seven white dogs to ride in a
cab.” Stevens emphasizes her need to validate herself in a world
(and a time period, indicated by the horse drawn cab) that essentially
ignores her—“She too is flesh.”
He also accentuates Victoria’s tendency toward the grandiose, but
it is her version of grandeur which is most likely, in Stevens’s
opinion, shabby and worn. Her
clothes are the cast off grandeur of yesterday revived by a woman who
desperately wants to feel luxurious on a presumably low budget.
So, with her seven white dogs, she proudly gets into a cab to ride,
but she most likely appears absurd to the people who witness this event. [O’Neal]
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Coleridge,
Samuel Taylor
|
(1772-1834).
English Romantic poet, thinker, and critic. Co-author (with
Wordsworth) of the epoch-making Lyrical Ballads (1798), he wrote such
famous poems as "Kubla Khan" and "The Rhime of the Ancient
Mariner" and books such as Biographia Literaria (1817). [Lavery]
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Colleoni,
Bartolomeo
|
(1400–1475).
An Italian soldier of fortune, who switched allegiances between Milan and
Milan. A chapel named after him can be found in Bergamo, Italy, and he is
memorialized by a statue by Verrocchio in Venice. [Lavery]
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Constable,
John
|
[1776-1837].
Major English landscape painter. Alluded to in “Like Decorations in a
Nigger Cemetery.” [Lavery]
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Corazon
|
Corazon appears in "Poetry is a Destructive
Force" (178) and is the name Stevens assigns to mammals in this poem
about misery. "Corazon, stout dog, / Young ox, bow-legged bear, / He
tastes its blood, not spit." Misery is completely destructive in
poetry, and the pain is so great that Corazon tastes his own blood.
Referring to poetry, Stevens ends the poem with the powerful statement,
"It can kill a man" (178). Thus Corazon is Stevens: the poet who
experiences the destructive force of poetry. Poetry is a Destructive Force [Regensburg]
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Corot,
Jean-Baptiste
|
(1796-1875).
French landscape painter known for his realistic depiction of laborers and
peasants. [Lavery]
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Countryman,
The
|
The
countryman is a figure in Stevens' poem of the same name.
He appears as a man of the earth, taking in the pure physical
sensation of the Swatara River as he walks beside it.
He cares not of the origin, destination or name of the river, only
of its sounds and movement. [Rhodes]
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Crispin
|
The
major character of "The Comedian as the Letter C," a second-rate
poet (he writes "his couplet yearly to the spring" and thinker
("the Socrates/Of snails, musician of pears, principium/And
lex") who becomes "washed away by magnitude" on an ocean
voyage, aspires to write a more imaginative poetry of place, marries,
becomes a father, and has his poetic ambitions "clipped." [Lavery]
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Croce,
Benedetto
|
(1866-1952).
Italian philosopher and historian, opponent of Mussolini and Italian
fascism. [Lavery]
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Crow
|
In
“Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery” (CPP 124), the crow is the
musical opposite of the oriole: “From
oriole to crow, note the decline / In music” (XXV, 1-2).
Known for its harsh call, the crow represents harsh reality
[“Crow is realist” (XXV, 2)] as contrasted to the beautiful song of
the oriole. However,
when the speaker states, “But, then, / Oriole, also, may be realist”
(XXV, 2-3), he suggests that the beauty of the oriole’s song merely
masks the same harsh reality that is readily apparent in the crow. [Wright]
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Cuban Doctor,
The
|
The
Cuban Doctor is the speaker of the poem “The Cuban Doctor.”
We are told that he “went to Egypt to escape / The Indian,”
(51) but his attempt to escape seems to have failed.
In the second stanza of the poem, the Cuban Doctor’s state of
consciousness becomes ambiguous when he states that the Indian was not
something “on a comfortable sofa dreamed” (47). This ambiguity is reiterated in the closing lines of the
poem when the Doctor says, “I knew my enemy was near—I, / Drowsing in
summer’s sleepiest horn” (47). Stevens
leaves the reader unsure about the events of the poem, perhaps to
illustrate that the real is merely something imagined or created and
believing otherwise would simply be foolish. [Atkins]
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Dante
|
[1265-1321].
Italian poet, author of the Divine Comedy, the story of the author's
journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, and La Vita Nuova, devoted to
his beloved Beatrice and the nature of ideal love. [Lavery]
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De Goncourt
|
Two
brothers, Edmond Louis Antoine de Goncourt (1822-96) and Jules Alfred Huot
de Goncourt (1830-70), who became literary collaborators. [Lavery]
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De Quincey,
Thomas
|
(1785-1859).
English essayist, famous for Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822).
[Lavery]
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de Staël,
Mme
|
(1766-1817).
French-Swiss Romantic woman of letters, born Anne Louise Germaine Necker,
author of On Germany (1810) and Ten Years of Exile (1818) and novels like
Delphine (1802) and Corinne (1807). [Lavery]
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Descartes,
René
|
(1596-1650).
French philosopher, the "father of modern philosophy," and
author of Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations (1642). His
Cartesian thought led to the development of philosophical
dualism. [Lavery]
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Doctor of
Geneva, The
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For
Stevens the Doctor of Geneva represents reason, "a man used to
plum." In contrast to
the "long-rolling opulent cataracts" of the sea, the Doctor of
Geneva is more akin to the finite (lakes, which have clear manageable
boundaries). In essence the
Doctor of Geneva is bound by reason and convention which Stevens' in some
ways seems to dislike. [Brigati]
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Don Joost
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[Lavery]
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Doudan,
Xavier
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[Lavery]
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Dufy,
Monsieur [Raoul]
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(1877-1953).
French painter, once associated with Fauvism, known for his watercolor
landscapes and seascapes.
Alluded to in Lions
in Sweden [Lavery]
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Dwarf, The
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In
“The Dwarf” the poet says “it is all that you are, the final dwarf
of you, that is woven and woven and waiting to be worn, neither as mask
nor as garment but as being, torn from insipid summer, for the mirror of
cold” (CPP 190-91). Hence,
“the final dwarf” seems to be a condition or a persona rather than a
character. [Crum]
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Elders, The
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The
Elders appear in part III of Stevens’ poem “Peter Quince at the
Clavier” (p. 73). Originally,
the characters come from the apocryphal story in the book of Daniel of
Susanna and the Elders. In
this tale, the moral and civic leaders of the Hebrews in exile are
revealed to be lascivious old men, who are willing to destroy the innocent
in order to retain their own reputations.
For Stevens, these represent the strong emotional impact of desire,
especially as expressed in aural art, such as in music and poetry. [Haynes]
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Eliot, T. S.
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(1888-1963).
American-born poet and critic, later a British citizen, author of such
great works as "The Wasteland" and Four Quartets. He and
Barfield were in a writing group together in London in the 1930s, and he
would later review several of Barfield's books favorably. [Lavery]
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Emperor of
Ice Cream
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The
Emperor of Ice Cream appears in his self-titled poem (CP 50) as the man in
charge of pleasure at an otherwise sad event, a funeral.
Looking literally at the poem, the “roller of big cigars,” the
muscular figure in the opening lines, the man who is, through his brute
strength, making ice cream, is the Emperor.
Sukenick calls him the pleasure master, for “The only
extraordinary thing in this occasion is to be pleasure, for pleasure is
the only power we will recognize to govern us” (Sukenick 63).
The Emperor and his ice cream serve as startlingly alive contrasts
to the dead woman in the second stanza. [O’Neal]
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Ephebe, The
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Ephebe is a youth between 18 and 20 years of age in
ancient Greece, typically a student. The term first appears in "Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction"(329-352) and is the one the speaker
addresses: "Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea" (329). The
speaker teaches the ephebe supreme fiction by breaking it into three
sections: It Must Be Abstract, It Must Change, and It Must Give Pleasure.
Thus the ephebe is a student of poetry. [Regensburg]
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