Of these twenty-two poems that we read, I found "The Plain Sense of Things" to be one of my favorite. From the very first sentence, "After the leaves have fallen, we return to a plain sense of things," I was captured in the text. We as people are so often distracted by big, glamorous items or bright shiny colors or large price tags that we hardly every think about what's underneath. We focus on what we can see and tend to ignore the rest, but when you strip away the outside, the beauty or colors of an object, you are left with an object in its truest form. Perhaps I am taking this completely out of context, but I can't help but think about some of the philosophers that we have read before this point and how they have tried to get their points across in their writings. I think about Emerson, and all of the different examples he gives his readers and his lists, or Ponty and all of the vocabulary he creates for himself, and I wonder what would have happened if they had tried to strip their thoughts/speeches/writings down to their barest bones. Ponty for example tries to inform people about phenomenology and the essence of things, but more often than not I would guess that he loses his readers with the way he writes. I don't know if it would even really be possible for him to really strip his writing down to the most basic parts of his thoughts and truly get his point across, but maybe simply telling "the plain sense of things" would result in a better understanding of what he is trying to say.
The other section of this poem that really got my attention was lines thirteen through nineteen, where Stevens writes: "Yet the absence of the imagination had itself to be imagined. The great pond, the plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves, mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see, that great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, required, as a necessity requires." Tying this back in to the conversation about Ponty's writing, even his most basic idea had to be thought of originally, and has greatness within it.
Yes. His stylistic feature of not only writing a poem (an elaborate piece of art) about "the plain sense of things" in a more plain way is performative in itself. It discloses that poetry as art does not necessarily have to be elaborate, for the topic at hand is what holds all of the elaborateness. In his writing, I feel that the language is not a hurdle for us to jump over in order to understand, nor is the language a barrier to comprehension because Stevens has access to the right words - the more simple words - unlike Ponty and many other writers. Simple does not mean worse at all.
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree with both of you about the beauty and depth of simple language. But...the way that I read "Yet the absence of the imagination had itself to be imagined" is as a kind of answer to, or even criticism of, what comes before. I think he's saying that we can never strip things down to what they "really are," without imagination because imagination is always part of our experience...so the idea that we can give a *completely* "plain sense of things" turns out to be just a different kind of imagination. At least that's my interpretation.
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