The Period of Modernism (1910-1945), Part 3

Question 1: Discuss the challenge Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” presents to its reader. 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 onceAnd 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.

Answer 1: Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” depicts a funeral scene, while commenting on the human fallibilities of those attending the wake. The interpretations of this poem are many, as it was written in a way to allow the reader’s personal opinion to dictate how they interpret the poem. The intent is to provoke an analysis and to allow the reader to closely look at the attitudes and actions of those who gather to pay their last respects. In “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” the festivities that are taking place at this particular wake express a sentiment that though a woman lies dead, life goes on. The “emperor of ice-cream” may be a contemptuous perception that ice-cream is more respectable than this crowd of so-called mourners, or a permissive one in which even the frivolities of life go on, even when the deceased is someone as important as a powerful emperor.

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Question 2: Describe how Marianne Moore’s “An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish” addresses both art and poetry.Here we have thirst/And patience, from the first,And art, as in a wave held up for us to see/In its essential perpendicularity;Not brittle but/Intense—the spectrum, thatSpectacular and nimble animal the fish,/Whose scales turn aside the sun’s sword with their polish.

Answer 2: Marianne Moore’s “An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish” is a poem that traces the process of creation, leading to the conclusion of the bottle. But it is also establishing criteria pertaining to art, which can also be applied to poetry. The poem begins with the alignment of thirst, patience and art within the object the speaker is contemplating. The first stanza concludes that art simply demands appreciation, while the second stanza appreciates what the artist has created. She observes that the work of art is genuine. This bottle not only aids in alleviating thirst, but it is a fish, created more perfectly even than its living model because it is glass, perfected by art. Just as its “scales turn aside the sun’s sword with their polish,” so the perfect poem is a reflecting, protecting and diverse surface.

Question 3: Discuss the influence and style of William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

Answer 3: “The Red Wheelbarrow,” by William Carlos Williams, exemplifies the Imagist philosophy popular during his time, in which things, not ideas, are the subject of literary focus. This style forgoes traditional British stress patterns, and creates a typical “American” image. The pictorial style in which the poem is written owes much to the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Charles Sheeler, whom Williams met shortly before composing the poem. At this time the Imagist philosophy was only ten years old. The poem is an exercise in exemplifying the importance of the ordinary. Through “The Red Wheelbarrow,” Williams states that a poem must not be realism, but reality itself, and by representing an object, this poem also represents an early stage in Williams’s evolution as a poet.

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