The Emperor of Ice Cream

"The Emperor of Ice-Cream" is a celebrated poem from Wallace Stevens' first collection of poetry, "Harmonium". It was first published in 1922, so it is in the public domain. [See Buttel, p. 20. See also the LibriVox site on the complete public domain poems of Wallace Stevens. [http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4077] ] The poem "wears a deliberately commonplace costume," he wrote in a letter, "and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it." [http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/stevens/letters.htm]
Helen Vendler's "Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire" includes a remarkable prose laying-out of the poem, [http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/stevens/emperor.htm] which discloses it as a reflection on the forced choice between the gross physicality of death and the animal greed of life. Or maybe Kenneth Lincoln is right to describe it as a "little nonsense ditty". [http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/stevens/emperor.htm] Stevens wrote after all that "a poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully". Not that Stevens understood his craft as a poetic fan dance, the reader a passive observer. He wrote,

...things that have their origin in the imagination or in the emotions very often take on a form that is ambiguous or uncertain. It is not possible to attach a single, rational meaning to such things without destroying the imaginative or emotional ambiguity or uncertainty that is inherent in them and that is why poets do not like to explain. That the meanings given by others are sometimes meanings not intended by the poet or that were never present in his mind does not impair them as meanings. [Quoted in Morse, p. 99.]

Drawing an analogy with Mahler's Fifth Symphony, Stevens continues, "The score with its markings contains any meaning that imaginative and sensitive listeners find in it. It takes very little to experience the variety in everything. The poet, the musician, both have explicit meanings but they express them in the forms these take and not in explanation." [Quoted in Morse, p. 99.]

Composer Roger Reynolds wrote an avant garde, mixed-media dramatization of the poem for 8 vocal soloists, piano, percussion, and double bass in 1961-62.

Ken Nordine, beat poet and innovator of a stylistic form known as "word jazz," recorded a rendition of Stevens's poem to the backing of eerily bubbly circus music on his 1994 album "Upper Limbo."

References

Bibliography

• Morse, Samuel French. "Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate -- Harold Bloom's Vast Accumulation". "The Wallace Stevens Journal". Volume 1, Numbers 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 1977)
• Stevens, Wallace. "The Explicator". Vol VII (November 1948), unpaged.
• Vendler, Helen. "Words Chosen Out of Desire". 1984: University of Tennessee Press.

* [http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides4/emperor.html#Top The Emperor of Ice Cream: Analysis and Study Guide]