Silent - Wallace Stevens

`The Creations of Sound`

by Wallace Stevens If the poetry of X was music, So that it came to him of its own, Without understanding, out of the wall Or in the ceiling, in sounds not chosen, Or chosen quickly, in a freedom That was their element, we should not know That X is an obstruction, a man Too exactly himself, and that there are words Better without an author, without a poet, Or having a separate author, a different poet, An accretion from ourselves, intelligent Beyond intelligence, an artificial man At a distance, a secondary expositor, A being of sound, whom one does not approach Through any exaggeration. From him, we collect. Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made dirtier. It is more than an imitation for the ear. He lacks this venerable complication. His poems are not of the second part of life. They do not make the visible a little hard To see nor, reverberating, eke out the mind Or peculiar horns, themselves eked out By the spontaneous particulars of sound. We do not say ourselves like that in poems. We say ourselves in syllables that rise From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak.