I’ve always found that for myself, the most enjoyable poetry bathed my brain in the meta-meaningful expansion/distortion of the resonance of its language: I grasp at the meaning of a word in a new way; I delve in between the words for clues (“how does a poem mean?”–Ciardi); I particularly delight in the tumble of jujitsu among the words, the interplay of juxtaposition and phrasing, the spoken sounds, rhymes and assonances. Thus, I submit my all-time favorite “Roses are red …” –

When roses are red
And ready for plucking
I’ll take you to the garden
And give you a rose

maybe I should change my fertilizer.

As for Emily D, one doesn’t become a “debauchee of dew” or thank Death for kindly delivering a timely reminder of mortality without arriving at those positions by way of some pretty strenuous mental exertion.

Williams shouldn’t be damned merely by his association with Pound, either. I, for one, don’t let politics dictate who my friends are. What all of these poets, and Stevens too, agree upon is that we should pay loving attention to the little things. No one can know why the red wheel barrow, tool or toy, is left out to be glazed with rain water; the point is to wonder, to simply but deeply pay attention. This is not authoritarianism in the least, though it did lead Williams, as a rueful critic of the American scene, to complain that our culture ultimately leaves us with “No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car.”

Stevens, at any rate knew that ideas of order are artifices–that thinking isn’t everything. He singled this poem out as special, a capstone for his oeuvre:

“Of Mere Being”

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

Roses are red;
violets aren’t enough.
Poems of ideas
make reading tough.

(I hated high-school English …)

There’s no arguing about the anti-intellectual strain of just about everything in our culture, but I’ve always sought out (and attempted to write) poetry that transcended the intellectual. Not NON-intellectual, but MORE THAN intellectual.

As we know, there was a problem with some of the idea and order stuff. “Anecdote of the Jar” is about forging reality – very constructivist in that, actually – and some argue that it smacks of the fascist. Williams was, if I remember correctly, friends with Pound, another intellectual poet, and corresponded with him while he was locked up.

I’m a fan of Stevens, of course, and wish we were more given to thinking about poetry. Hell, to thinking, period. But some of our prominent intellectual poets were perhaps prone to an authoritarianism that gives pause….