The “Morality” of the “Right Sensation”

Wallace Stevens, one of my favorite and most musical poets, in The Necessary Angel, speaks of “... the pleasure of the powers that create a truth that cannot be arrived at by reason alone, a truth that the poet recognizes by sensation. The morality of the poet's radiant and productive atmosphere is the morality of the right sensation” (p. 58).

This really speaks to me. It seems to me this is what poetry is all about. A philosophical treatise can give you a reasoned truth, but that’s not the same thing at all as a poetic truth, ringing with vibrant music, juxtaposing images that make a tapestry you never saw before and can’t describe to others except in the language of the poem. On a second reading it may be subtly different. Others will hear a slightly different music, see a different image, and feel their own lives reflected in it in a different manner.

It’s the powers that create that truth that interest me most. I think of them as inherent in one’s Mother Tongue. From in utero the unborn child is listening to its mother’s heart beat, her gurgling digestion, her voice resonating down from the voice box through the lungs and into the embryonic sac. He or she knows when the hormone’s juices of truth correspond to the utterances of word, and when they do not, and after his birth will more distantly confirm the truth and falsity of those words as a child at her knees.

In hewing to the “ur sensation” of language (not the clichés of Madison Avenue) the poet lives it anew and revitalizes it for all of us. This is the “morality of the poet’s radiant and productive atmosphere... the morality of the right sensation,” that he or she is privileged to live within. Some privilege, what?

Comments?

Leland