Title:

Subject:

Date:

<aside> 💡 Key Points:

• Main Ideas

• Key words

• Questions that connect points

• Important points

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<aside> ✏️ Notes:

Main lecture notes

• Difficult and complex poems
• Poetry must be irrational."
• he likes signifier v signified

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

• night gowns so night time
• disappointing with smt
• haunted houses” ghostly kind of a presence? whose houses, urban landscape
• white night-gowns both for male and female, and ghost like haunting the houses
• color symbolism
• purple, green, yellow, blue
• lack of imaginations disappointing him
• no personal pronoun
• red weather in safari
• boring dull middle class life
• Criticism of Capitalism, Wasp way of life middle class
• complaining of lack of imaginations
• conventional subject matter is imagination vs reality
• he likes to observe it
• transcends it
• speaker is an observer not didactic but he sides with imaginations
• coherent poem

Anecdote of the Jar

• He transcends the binaries
• playing with the language
• What does the Jar stand for? Jar and Nature?
• Deconstructio
• Building and subverting the meaning
• Constructing and reconstructing
• Jar= Human Technology
• Wilderness= nature
• Does not rely on end rhyme!
• Contradiction and incoherence
• nature- wilderness x Jar= Tennesee
• Pronoun “I” and then it changes to “it”
• Jar and hills are round
• No fixed meaning
• Modernist- semantic complexity- tension in the language

Of Modern Poetry

• Reality vs imagination
• Signifier and the signified
• Poetry should respond to realities of the time.
• He implies the rational mind
• Poetry doesnt have to be searching previous tradionist that it imitates the already set traditions?
• suffice- repetition
• similes, comparisons, analogies
• poet of the sense, a symbolist
• mind has an ear, person fiction of the mind
• platonic metaphysic, binaries of Plato
• Poetry should talk about everyday things

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<aside> 📎 Summary:

A brief summary and conclusion about the notes/lecture

🎩 Wallace Stevens: The Poet of Imagination and Modern Complexity

🧠 General Overview

• Wallace Stevens (1879–1955): A Modernist American poet whose work is known for philosophical abstraction, semantic complexity, and imaginative vision.
• He held a corporate job (insurance executive) while writing deeply complex poetry.
• Influenced by symbolism, philosophy (esp. phenomenology), and linguistics — especially the tension between signifier and signified (Saussurean linguistics).
• Famous for saying, “Poetry must be irrational,” emphasizing the imaginative, non-logical elements of language.

🕙 "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" (1915)

🧵 Summary:

• A short, surreal critique of conformity, middle-class dullness, and the lack of imagination in modern life.

🧠 Key Themes:

• Imagination vs Reality
• Color and Fantasy vs Monotony
• Modern urban life = ghostly, colorless, unimaginative

🔍 Analysis:

• “The houses are haunted / By white night-gowns.”
• “None of them are strange... Except in one house…”
• Narrative voice: The poem is observational, not overtly didactic — yet the speaker clearly aligns with the imaginative and the surreal.

🫙 "Anecdote of the Jar" (1919)

🧠 Key Themes:

• Human order vs natural wilderness
• Imposition of meaning </aside>