107:), a French literary and cultural affairs magazine that has been published monthly in Paris since 1829. The epigraph reads, "She knew all the legends of Paradise and all the stories about Poland." The first-line reference to the Polish aunt's "saints from Voragine" is most likely to Jacobus de Voragine, the author of a medieval bestseller,
121:
subject as an epistemological one, and have written about his views on the imagination and its uneasy rapport with reality. Others have seen his subject as a moral one, a justification of an aesthetic hedonism. Still others have seen his subject as a native humanist one, the quest of the
American Adam for a Paradise in the wilderness."
148:("swathed in indigo") and pictures as figures in a pre-Raphaelite painting, who burn secretly for otherworldly saints. What the speaker imagines of the ordinary women is almost accurate. Their imaginations blur together the exotic St. George and other young warriors, young men like those who died in the mud of World War I.
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Stevens did not often bother with justifying his aestheticism, and the term "hedonism" diminishes his artistic ambition to lift himself and his reader from the daily ennui to at least a temporary heightening and intensification of life, an aesthetic experience. Also, the speaker's exchange with his
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The poem dramatizes one of
Stevens's major themes, the relationship between imagination and reality. "Colloquy with a Polish Aunt," though, is one of Stevens' many poems that resists the intelligence almost successfully. The scholar Helen Vendler writes of this poem that "Some readers have seen his
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For the skeptical and splenetic speaker, the legendary characters, the saints, are merely old buffoons (rhymes with "pantaloons"). But the Polish aunt pulls the speaker off his high horse. She tells him that the women he dreams of are "common drudges," whom his imagination dresses exotically
113:, a book of lives of the saints. That book features St George prominently. What would such an author and such a book have to do with Stevens' 1919 poem? One answer might be that in that period St. George appeared on many World War I recruitment
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The aunt's imagination dwells on medieval saints; the speaker's imagination dresses drudges in indigo (and all that that implies); the drudges imagine the young men around them as Saint
Georges (and all that that implies).
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The Polish aunt in this way teaches the speaker a wise lesson about the "uneasy rapport" between reality and the imagination.
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Polish aunt seems to occur in a world far removed from the
American wilderness (which one encounters, for instance, in
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with his devout and somewhat learned aunt. She begins by upbraiding him. She accuses him of being "
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Frogs Eat
Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs
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As mentioned above, the aunt's favorite book is
Jacobus of Voragine's
140:" about her idealized saints, whom he probably views as fantasies.
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Elle savait toutes les légendes du
Paradis et tous les contes de la
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Cy Est
Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges
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62: In their embroidered slippers, touch your spleen?
88: To read, in secret, their burning secrecies....
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The French epigraph at the start of the poem is from
32:. It was first published in 1919 and is included in
635:Jasmine's Beautiful Thoughts Underneath The Willow
132:The speaker is on a "high horse" so he can have a
86: Holding their books toward the nearer stars,
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523:The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician
82: Thus, on the basis of the common drudge,
60: How is it that my saints from Voragaine,
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8:
84: You dream of women, swathed in indigo,
80: Imagination is the will of things....
71: Old pantaloons, duenna of the spring!
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230:
222:
285:The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage
209:Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium
726:Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
204:. 1985: University of California Press.
177:The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.
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34:The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
775:The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade
656:The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws
179:Vintage Books: New York, 1954, p. 84.
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211:. Princeton University Press, 1967.
495:Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks
474:On the Manner of Addressing Clouds
200:Bates, Milton J. Wallace Stevens:
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691:Two Figures in Dense Violet Night
218:. Harvard University Press, 1969.
192:. 1969: Harvard University Press.
502:A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
761:The Surprises of the Superhuman
712:Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion
481:Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb
446:Anecdote of Men by the Thousand
369:Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores
50:Pologne. Revue des Deux Mondes
565:Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock
460:Floral Decorations for Bananas
341:Nuances of a Theme by Williams
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740:The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad
579:The Virgin Carrying a Lantern
390:Homunculus et la Belle Etoile
20:"Colloquy with a Polish Aunt"
453:The Apostrophe to Vincentine
404:From the Misery of Don Joost
397:The Comedian as the Letter C
719:Peter Quince at the Clavier
705:To the One of Fictive Music
677:Colloquy with a Polish Aunt
509:The Place of the Solitaires
40:Colloquy with a Polish Aunt
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768:Sea Surface Full of Clouds
600:Six Significant Landscapes
425:The Worms at Heaven's Gate
292:The Plot Against the Giant
842:Poetry by Wallace Stevens
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105:Journal of the Two Worlds
26:'s first book of poetry,
558:Tea at the Palaz of Hoon
544:The Emperor of Ice-Cream
537:Depression Before Spring
488:Of the Surface of Things
418:Last Looks at the Lilacs
411:O Florida, Venereal Soil
348:Metaphors of a Magnifico
334:Le Monocle de Mon Oncle
278:Invective Against Swans
16:Poem by Wallace Stevens
747:The Death of a Soldier
642:Cortège for Rosenbloom
327:The Load Of Sugar-Cane
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101:Revue des deux mondes
621:Palace of the Babies
607:Bantam in Pine-Woods
789:Anatomy of Monotony
614:Anecdote of the Jar
586:Stars at Tallapoosa
516:The Weeping Burgher
355:Ploughing on Sunday
306:Domination of Black
202:A Mythology of Self
376:Fabliau of Florida
320:The Ordinary Women
145:The Golden Legend.
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796:The Public Square
467:Anecdote of Canna
216:On Extended Wings
190:On Extended Wings
127:"Earthy Anecdote"
110:The Golden Legend
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782:Lunar Paraphrase
551:The Cuban Doctor
383:Doctor of Geneva
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214:Vendler, Helen.
207:Buttel, Robert.
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733:Nomad Exquisite
670:The Wind Shifts
432:The Jack-Rabbit
271:Earthy Anecdote
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259:Wallace Stevens
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188:Helen Vendler.
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95:Interpretation
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530:Banal Sojourn
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593:Explanation
832:1919 poems
826:Categories
164:References
254:Harmonium
138:splenetic
29:Harmonium
754:Negation
684:Gubbinal
134:colloquy
36:(1954).
115:posters
698:Theory
649:Tattoo
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155:Notes
810:Tea
257:by
76:She
56:She
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67:He
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