The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage
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"The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1919, so it is in the public domain.[1] There is general agreement that it is indebted to Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, though there is some uncertainty about the nature of the debt.
| The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage
But not on a shell, she starts, |
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."[2] 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."[3]) 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). Undoubtedly she would also disapprove of the suggestion that the "archaic" one of the first two lines is foam-arisen Aphrodite, 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.
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Buttel, R. Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium. 1967: Princeton University Press.
- Raine, Craig. Encounter 53 (November 1079).
- Vendler, Helen. Words Chosen Out Of Desire. 1984: University of Tennessee Press.
