고귀성과 현실 -월리스 스티븐스의 「고귀한 기수와 낱말의 소리」 읽기

Abstract

“The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” was read by Wallace Stevens at Princeton in 1942, and became the first chapter of his collection of essays, The Necessary Angel, in 1952. It shows well the poet’s stance at the very beginning of his poetic career, and prognosticates the ensuing developments of his basic concepts such as reality and the imagination. It deals with the reason why the imagination is indispensible to modern life, and exemplifies the way it has worked from Plato to a modern artist. The imagination has been so various in meaning as not to have any meaning at all, and often treated as almost equivalent to the poet’s creative power, as in S. T. Coleridge’s “Secondary Imagination.” In “The Noble Rider” Stevens tries to provide us with a better illustration of art by which we can develop a new sense of imagination adaptable to the new “pressure of reality.” To show the different way the imagination works in history, Stevens chooses to present several episodes, deliberately revealing how the idea of nobility degenerated. Among them are an excerpt from Plato’s Phaedrus, Andrea del Verrocchio’s equestrian statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Clark Mills’s statue of Andrew Jackson, and Reginald Marsh’s Wooden Horses. In the last example, Wooden Horses, Stevens’s effort to form “the figure of a possible poet” seems to come to a transient end. The possible poet, inevitably contemporaneous, should continue to compose another proper relation between the imagination and reality against ever-changing reality, to “help people to live their lives.” The nobility of a sort may now be related to “ribald and hilarious reality” as in the merry-go-round picture, which is “not without imagination” and “far from being without aesthetic theory.”