We can all take ourselves too seriously. Some of us do, often. In my case I often think poems are very important and a serious part of life. (They are, and they are.) Still, it is helpful to remember that poems and art are not only about serious things.

One and a half years ago I was at a New Year’s party and found myself in conversation with a composer who lives in Vermont. I love to talk about music, which more and more seems to me the greatest of the arts.

When I was in college, I read a poem about vowels – how each had a color – by Arthur Rimbaud. I did not like the poem then, and I do not particularly like it now.

But recently I had occasion to re-read the poem (which is how I know I do not like it now) and, fortunately, I decided to keep reading Rimbaud. He is, as I have often thought, close to incomprehensible to me. And yet there is something about him that is immensely important.

I’ll start with Alexander Pope, although shortly we will move from him into something almost entirely opposite. In his “An Essay on Criticism” (1711) he wrote what is, to my mind, the most pithy and most memorable definition of poetry we have: “True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest,/ What oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest” [my italics]. Eminently rational, it was consonant with the “Age of Reason” which was to follow.

Paul Celan was the son of Jewish parents. Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (then Romania, now the Ukraine), he wrote in German.

When Hitler and the Nazis moved eastward, his parents were imprisoned in a forced labor camp. His father died in the camp, likely of typhoid fever. His mother, exhausted by hard labor, was shot and killed. Celan, away when his parents were deported, was himself sent to a labor camp, where he learned the fate of his parents.

If there is a concluding line to a poem that is worth remembering, pondering, cherishing, it is the last half line of this poem by Richard Wilbur: “Keeping their difficult balance.” For surely that is what we strive for in this, our world, keeping our balance as we travel though monotonous repetitions, injustice, and the difficulties of relating to other human beings with all their imperfections.

Spring has come very, very slowly to northern New England. The lilacs have not yet bloomed: in most years, they are done by now. Flowering crabapples, too: very late, just bursting into color, when most years they would be done.

Sometimes poems are not all that difficult, yet move us deeply. They stick with us because they seem, well, so appropriate to our world and our experiences. So it is with this poem by Robert Frost.

Eight lines, six syllables to a line (except for the emphatic final line, which has five), rhymed couplets. Pretty simple.

I listen to a lot of music. A lot. At times I wonder why music appeals to me so much, why I find myself deeply connected to it, why sometimes I am deeply moved by it.

Why? I have discovered many answers to my questions in a short poem by Rainer Maria Rilke.

A short while ago I had lunch with a lawyer friend, and we started talking about Wallace Stevens, the poet we are going to look at, who was himself a lawyer. A very good lawyer. I mention at the outset because my friend and I agreed that, for Stevens, there was always yet another perception on one of the most basic of questions: Whether reality is real or imagined.

Under the heading, ‘Things you did not need to know about me’ would be this statement: I do not dream, by which I mean I do not remember my dreams. Well, maybe that is not true for the very recent past. For what may be the first time, I have been awakening with a memory of what I had been dreaming about. But you did not need to know this, either.

This is a short essay on a very short poem. I chose it because the poem is one of my favorites. I sent it to someone, commending it despite its brevity. I acknowledge that there is a strangeness to my choice to write about a such a simple poem. That week I went to lots of chamber music – Bach, Beethoven and Brahms especially – and encountered complexity upon complexity. I get complexity. Simplicity, well, it is sometimes hard to know what to make of it….

It was hard to press the ‘Send’ button on this email. The essay itself is about the struggle between bourgeois values and other things. We all know that good intellectuals should be in rebellion against bourgeois values, yet this essay takes those values seriously and even acknowledges the hold they have on us. And further, to some extent it commends the grip of the bourgeois on our consciousness.

Here in Vermont I went to a concert of works based on food. The concert was sponsored by Scrag Mountain Music, a central Vermont organization that promotes music in unusual places (local public schools, farmers’ markets) so that ‘classical’ music can take its rightful place as part of our lives. The poem below was the first piece of music on the program.

Every summer I envelop myself in chamber music at the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival One of the performances this past summer there was a piece for piano and violin by Claude Debussy. I don’t like Debussy, although I recognize that his easy movement away from tonality was a major progenitor of music in the twentieth century.

The voice that speaks to us in the poem is not necessarily the voice of the poet. It is not the voice of the commentator, either. Yet we all have voices within us that we need to recognize as a part – part – of who we are. Poets remind us of the multiple voices within that complexity that is the self.

In my view, which is probably jaundiced, Auden had a few golden years. His early poetry is, to my mind, precocious, flaunting his poetic powers even as he has not all that much to write about. His late poetry is overly Christian: like T. S. Eliot, he found a needed coherence as he aged by embracing religion.

This is an odd essay. I begin heading in one direction only to find myself, along the way, heading in an entirely different direction.