Modernist poet Wallace Stevens balanced his long career as an insurance executive with a thrilling life of the imagination. Actor Murray Bartlett, ice cream maker Gus Rancatore, cognitive scientist Laurie Santos, scholar Al Filreis, poet David Baker, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Bob Rubin, and the 2021 National Student Poets join Elisa New.
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THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
THE MOTIVE FOR METAPHOR
You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.
In the same way, you were happy in the spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon–
The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,
Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,
The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound–
Steel against intimation–the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.
THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
THE MOTIVE FOR METAPHOR
You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.
In the same way, you were happy in the spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon–
The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,
Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,
The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound–
Steel against intimation–the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.
“The Emperor of Ice-Cream” by Wallace Stevens. First published in HARMONIUM by Wallace Stevens, 1923.
“The Motive for Metaphor” by Wallace Stevens, from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF
WALLACE STEVENS, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982
by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf
Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.”
Poet
Actor
Professor, University of Pennsylvania
Toscanini’s Ice Cream
Fmr. Secretary of the Treasury
Cognitive Scientist
Staff Writer, New Yorker
“This poem is known in a largely misunderstood fashion by many of my customers, because I think they believe it's kind of a happy poem about a guy, usually associated with the good feelings that people have when they eat ice cream. And the poem is much different.”—Gus Rancatore, Owner, Toscanini’s Ice Cream, on “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”
What Stevens actually means to conjure up is not the sweetness of an ice cream stand but the bonanza of a wild party. “Big cigars,” “wenches,” “muscles,” “whip[s]”—the atmosphere is closer to a carnival. New Yorker staff writer Louisa Thomas says: “From the first line, ‘Call the roller of big cigars.’ It's like we are at a carnival and we are at a circus. It's summer. It's hot. We're eating ice cream.” Image credit: Library of Congress
Although a key Modernist poet, Wallace Stevens did not live a typical artist’s life. He didn’t sleep on couches or travel the world, he didn’t settle in New York or Paris, he wasn’t a revolutionary and he wasn't bohemian. Stevens was a rich insurance salesman living in a mansion in Hartford, CT. His artistic life was almost entirely divorced from his personal life. The image, above, of Stevens in the garden behind his house, is courtesy of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Of Stevens’s bourgeoisie day-to-day, New Yorker staff writer Louisa Thomas says: “I believe in the power of a rich interior life to make a world worth living in. And I think Stevens does that and interrogates it and pulls at it.”
Although he never traveled outside of America, Wallace Stevens made multiple trips to the plush Casa Marina resort in Key West. Unaccompanied by his wife, who lived in a separate wing of their house, Stevens would enjoy the pleasures of the tropics. Image credit: Monroe County Public Library / Florida Keys History Center
“Spring is new to me because I grew up in Australia. We don't really have spring. I walk past this bunch of trees and bushes and you could almost see the colors of the flowers. I can see a little bit of the, you know, 'the half colors of quarter-things.'"—Murray Bartlett, Emmy-winning Actor on “Motive for Metaphor”
Stevens's “Motive for Metaphor” is a philosophical consideration of what it really means to compare unlike things. Stevens suggests some reasons: maybe you do it simply for the syllable-by-syllable pleasure (“... repeats words without meaning”) or simply to cast things in a different light (“The obscure moon lighting an obscure world”). But, ultimately, he seems to conclude that it is done to reinvent the world. To make it richer, more complex. “That's what the motive for metaphor is, to compare something that's not like something else and the comparing creates change. Change is exhilarating.”—Al Filreis, Professor, University of Pennsylvania
