Re: Seymour's poetry
citycabn (citycabn@gateway.net)
Tue, 05 Oct 1999 09:07:56 -0700
Colin,
I think I was off-list when you posted the below.
Quickly: In February of '99 there was a substantial thread re
Seymour/Salinger/Poetry. (It would be found in Tim's On-line Archives.) Of
course it did not touch on the Jarrell angle. I know Paul K. thinks
Jarrell's novel "Pictures from an Institution " (1954) influenced JDS. I
haven't read it so can't say. As for Jarrell's poetry, I would say no. Not
sure if or when JDS would have been familiar with it. Jarrell I believe was
mainly known as a critic early on; his later poetry did win prizes however.
(His first book of poetry was in 1942; he wrote some of the best verse re
WWII; he was a probable suicide in 1965. Poetry is a high-risk endeavor.)
Seymour was "invented" in late '47, probably out of Ray Ford of The Inverted
Forest plus Rilke plus Eliot plus ?. At that time he was definitely a
*western* poet. Cf. the refs. to Rilke and Eliot in Bananafish. The later
Seymour--the 1955 to 1965 Seymour--I would say, is JDS's idealized poet,
straddling East and West. He is Blake, Dickinson, Rilke, the greatest of
the great Japanese and Chinese poets rolled into one Mythic Poet whose poems
would burn the printed page. I liked the Stevens' poems very much; good
catch! An odd rhyme: Stevens died the year of the publication of RHTRBC,
the true introduction of the Glass Family.
--Bruce
-----Original Message-----
From: Colin <colin@cpink.demon.co.uk>
To: bananafish@lists.nyu.edu <bananafish@lists.nyu.edu>
Date: Friday, October 01, 1999 12:32 AM
Subject: Seymour's poetry
>Back in July I drew the attention of the list to a suggestion by Adam
>Gopnik, writing in the New Yorker, that Randall Jarrell might have been
>a source for the poet Seymour. No one had anything much to say about
>it.
>
>In portraying Seymour as a great poet JDS sets himself a big problem in
>that, as a prose writer, he is not capable of writing sufficiently
>impressive verse to 'quote' Seymour's poetry directly; instead he has to
>resort to a few indirect descriptions of the poems with excuses why he
>is not quoting them to the reader.
>
>Lately I've been reading the collected poems of Wallace Stevens and I
>was struck by how Seymouresque a few of the poems are. I'm not
>suggesting Stevens is a source for Seymour, just that some of his poems,
>in particular 'Six Significant Landscapes', struck me very strongly as
>the kind of poems I could imagine Seymour writing.
>
>For example:
>
>SIX SIGNIFICANT LANDSCAPES
>
>I
>
>An old man sits
>In the shadow of a pine tree
>In China.
>He sees larkspur,
>Blue and white,
>At the edge of the shadow,
>Move in the wind.
>His beard moves in the wind.
>The pine tree moves in the wind.
>Thus water flows
>Over weeds.
>
>II
>
>The night is of the color
>Of a woman's arm:
>Night, the female,
>Obscure,
>Fragrant and supple,
>Conceals herself.
>A pool shines,
>Like a bracelet
>Shaken in a dance.
>
>III
>
>I measure myself
>Against a tall tree.
>I find that I am much taller,
>For I reach right up to the sun,
>With my eye;
>And I reach to the shore of the sea
>With my ear.
>Nevertheless, I dislike
>The way the ants crawl
>In and out of my shadow.
>
>IV
>
>When my dream was near the moon,
>The white folds of its gown
>Filled with yellow light.
>The soles of its feet
>Grew red.
>Its hair filled
>With certain blue crystallizations
>>From stars,
>Not far off.
>
>V
>
>Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
>Nor the chisels of the long streets,
>Nor the mallets of the domes
>And high towers,
>Can carve
>What one star can carve,
>Shining through the grape-leaves.
>
>VI
>
>Rationalists, wearing square hats,
>Think, in square rooms,
>Looking at the floor,
>Looking at the ceiling.
>They confine themselves
>To right-angled triangles.
>If they tried rhomboids,
>Cones, waving lines, ellipses -
>As, for example, the ellipse of the half-
> moon -
>Rationalists would wear sombreros.
>
>
>
>--
>Colin
>