Episode 2021
The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage
Tue, 2022-Nov-15 00:01 UTC
Length - 2:28
Direct Link
Welcome to random Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of a random Wikipedia page every day.
The random article for Tuesday, 15 November 2022 is The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage.
"The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book, Harmonium. Originally published in 1919, it is in the public domain. Despite general agreement that it is indebted to Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, there is uncertainty about the nature of the debt.
Helen Vendler takes it as obvious that the poem is about "our impoverished American Venus, who has none of the trappings of Botticelli's Venus, but who will eventually accumulate aura and mythological fullness through new American art". She dismisses the English poet Craig Raine's identification of the paltry nude with a sailboat. ("The nude is, one guesses, a sailing boat.... Later, the ship will be weather-beaten, a goldener nude, and will eventually sink.") That only confirms that "the English incomprehension of Stevens continues almost unabated", she acidly remarks, conceding that Frank Kermode is the exception that proves the rule. She might concede that the "archaic" one of the first two lines is foam-arisen Aphrodite, who the paltry nude is not, but might well disapprove of the suggestion that the one who "scuds the glitters" is the American Venus (reduced to scudding on a weed) and that "the goldener nude" is Botticelli's Venus.
Ronald Sukenick declares with equal certainty that "the nude is an emblematic figure of spring. There is a comparison between spring, in the first part of the poem, and a similar figure representing summer, in the latter part. Thus spring is 'paltry,' particularly early spring, spring at the start of her voyage, as compared with the fullness of summer described later on." He also declares that the correct word is "scurry", not the "scrurry" of the Collected Poems as reproduced here. (Ibid.)
Compare Stevens's poem "Bantam in Pine-Woods" which also makes a statement about the new American art.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:01 UTC on Tuesday, 15 November 2022.
For the full current version of the article, see The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage on Wikipedia.
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This has been Arthur Neural. Thank you for listening to random Wiki of the Day.
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