Wallace Stevens 1879–1955
Wallace Stevens is one of America's most respected poets. He was an amazing stylist, using an extraordinary vocabulary and a extreme precision in crafting his poems. But he was also a philosopher of aesthetics, vigorously exploring the notion of poetry as a combination of imagination and objective reality. Because of the extreme technical complexity of his work, Stevens was sometimes considered a willfully difficult poet. But was also acknowledged as an eminent abstractionist and a provocative thinker, and that reputation has continued since his death. In 1975, for instance, noted literary critic Harold Bloom, whose writings on Stevens include the imposing Wallace Stevens. The Poems of Our Climate, called him "the best and most representative American poet of our time."
The Irish Cliffs of Moher
Wallace Stevens
Who is my father in this world, in this house,
At the spirit’s base?
My father’s father, his father’s father, his--
Shadows like winds
Go back to a parent before thought, before speech,
At the head of the past.
They go to the cliffs of Moher rising out of the mist,
Above the real,
Rising out of present time and place, above
The wet, green grass.
This is not landscape, full of the somnambulations
Of poetry
And the sea. This is my father or, maybe,
It is as he was,
A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earth
And sea and air.
Poem Analysis - Literary devices
There are several literary devices used in the poem "The Irish Cliffs of Moher" including repetition, personification, and imagery. Repetition occurs as the speaker talks about thinking back to the the time of his father, his father, and his father, and so forth. This is to emphasize that the speaker wants us to think back to the beginning of time. Personification is used as the speaker is comparing his father to the sea, air, and earth in the last line of the poem. He is saying that his oldest ancestor is the land and sea of the Cliffs of Moher. He feels so at home on the Cliffs of Moher it feels like family and that his family comes from that land and like the land is an ancestor. Imagery is used as the speaker is describing the landscape of the cliffs. The author is describing how the landscape looks while he or she is on the journey “Rising out of present time and place, above the wet, green grass.” The writer wants you to have a mental image of the cliffs and how beautiful the landscapes are including the grass.