Of the Surface of Things, Kartoniert / Broschiert

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Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. "Of the Surface of Things" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published in 1919, so it is in the public domain. Buttel understands the poem as implementing Stevens's "anti-poetic" strategy of moving into a poem in an offhand way. He finds that the prose rhythms of the first stanza contrast strikingly with the metrical regularity of the quoted line about the belle undressing. That line is so delicately honest that it almost had to be quoted, in order to give the speaker some distance from it. The sturdy epistemic modesty of the first stanza contrasts with the intense opacity of the final stanza. Is it saying that the real tree basks in the illumination of imagination? Is the singer a poet like Whitman, who pushes through what is prosaic ("three or four hills and a cloud") or beyond his understanding, in order to give full vent to his imagination in for instance "Song of Myself"?