Things as they are have been destroyed. Have I? Am I a man that is dead At a table on which the food is cold? Is my thought a memory, not alive? Is t… - Wallace Stevens

His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick, Inevitably modulating, in the blood. And war for war, each has its gallant kind. <p>How simply the fictive hero becomes the real; How gladly with proper words the solider dies, If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.

Is there a poem that never reaches words<p> And one that chaffers the time away? Is the poem both peculiar and general? There’s a meditation there, in which there seems To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or Not apprehended well. Does the poet Evade us, as in a senseless element?

Let’s see the very thing and nothing else. Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight. Burn everything not part of it to ash. Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky Without evasion by a single metaphor. Look at it in its essential barrenness And say this, this is the centre that I seek.