A poem by Wallace Stevens
Read by David Gascoyne with music composed by Humphrey Searle played by Freddie Phillips
To an extent unusual even in modern literature, Wallace Stevens' poems are about poetry itself. ' His recurring preoccupation,' a critic has said, ' is to penetrate by absolute self-consciousness into the nature of the poetic act.'
( Poetry is the subject of the poem, Front this the poem issues and To this returns. Between the two, Between issue and return, there is An absence in reality, Things as they are.'
In this strapgely elegant sequence Wallace Stevens struggles to impose order upon-or give meaning to the chaos of everyday experience (' things as they are ') by the act of poetic imagination.