#5
Wallace Stevens said that poetry was his way of making the world palatable. "It's the way of making one's experience, almost wholly inexplicable, acceptable," he said.
Later in his years he felt a sense of imminent tragedy in the world, and to this situation a poet addresses himself: "What he gets is not necessarily a solution but some defense against it." In "The Necessary Angel," a book of his essays published in 1951, the poet said: "My final point, then, is that imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos."
Some comments I wrote before somehow echo Stevens' remarks -
诗人是群严肃的人,写诗反映了他们生活中严肃的一面。然而,诗歌还反映了诗人乐观的一面。诗歌是人类最美好的传统,是人类心灵和高贵情感的preservation。诗,如轻盈的飞鸟,越过无垠的时空旷野,将古往今来的无数人心连接起来,并向上提升。这是一种壮丽的力量。诗人该比任何人更敏感,更能看到生命的虚无,也因此更有能力来counter-balance这种虚无,将自己的思想和想像化为诗歌,使之成为别人的inspiration。诗人用凡人的口说着神的语言,给无意义的生活带来意义。这一切于人们的精神世界都是乐观的,建设性的。
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