Can anyone be of help to me in understanding the poems of Wallace Stevens?
I read some of his poems, but they did not really “speak to me”. But, I would say this about understanding poems: Poetry and jokes have a similar quality, that when someone has to explain them to you, they’re not quite the same as when you just “get it”. In high school I had a pretty good literature book (Perrine’s Literature) and sometimes I read stories and poems from it that were not assigned for the class. Since the stuff I was reading was unassigned there was no reading guide and the teacher did not discuss that material in class. There was one particular poem, by A E Houseman, that intrigued me very much, but I could not really understand. Here it is: homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/housman.clock.html I found that poem to be really compelling for some reason, but I didn’t know at all what it was about. I really couldn’t figure it out and after a few weeks of
