"Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" is a poem from

Wallace Stevens Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance compa ...

's first book of poetry,

Harmonium The pump organ is a type of free-reed organ that generates sound as air flows past a vibrating piece of thin metal in a frame. The piece of metal is called a reed. Specific types of pump organ include the reed organ, harmonium, and melodeon. T ...

. It was first published in 1921, so it is in the public domain.

Interpretation

This poem is central to Harold Bloom's reading of Stevens's ''Harmonium'', as marking the poet's progress over the perspectivism of " The Snow Man" and the pessimism of " The Man whose Pharynx was bad". The reader who masters these poems and their interrelationships has, according to Bloom, "reached the center of Stevens's poetic and human anxieties and of his resources for meeting those anxieties". "Hoon" points the way towards Stevens's future development as a poet, in his view. "Hoon" is easily understood as a philosophical poem, lending itself to interpretation as an exercise in the philosophy of

solipsism Solipsism (; ) is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known an ...

or subjective

idealism In philosophy, the term idealism identifies and describes metaphysical perspectives which assert that reality is indistinguishable and inseparable from perception and understanding; that reality is a mental construct closely connected to ide ...

such as

Fichte Johann Gottlieb Fichte (; ; 19 May 1762 – 29 January 1814) was a German philosopher who became a founding figure of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, which developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kan ...

's. It can also be read as a statement of a psychological theory like

Freud Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts in ...

's that hypothesizes an unconscious mental domain that influences conscious mental life. Bordering on such interpretations but neutral among them is the idea that the poem is about the poet's experience of self-discovery through imaginative construction of himself. The poet's creativity in this regard is perhaps extreme, but it makes his self more ''his'' self, hence he finds himself "more truly and more strange". A key to the interpretation of the poem is identification of the addressee, "you", with

Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, Prose poetry, prose poet, cultural critic, Philology, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philo ...

and

Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer ( , ; 22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work ''The World as Will and Representation'' (expanded in 1844), which characterizes the phenomenal world as the prod ...

being more likely candidates than either Fichte or Freud. Milton J. Bates remarks that the regal figure of Hoon is the figure least qualified by irony among the early protagonists of ''Harmonium''.

Without a visit to Hoon in his palaz, one will not appreciate how Stevens's poems of the thirties, though they are not intimately autobiographical, might nevertheless be said to contain and discourse of himself alone.

He adds that the pure poet "bathes his nominal subject in the imaginative effulgence

hat A hat is a head covering which is worn for various reasons, including protection against weather conditions, ceremonial reasons such as university graduation, religious reasons, safety, or as a fashion accessory. Hats which incorporate mecha ...

Stevens called the 'poetry of the subject'". The pure poet is distinguished from the local poet who defines himself as the intelligence of his soil, in that the former applies himself to what Stevens called "the idea of pure poetry: imagination, extended beyond local consciousness,...an idea to be held in common by South, West, North and East." (See "The Comedian as the Letter C" regarding the topic of local poetry. See also the main ''

'' essay, especially the section "Locality".) Although this poem was written before "Comedian", Bates is proposing that Stevens "found Hoon's course more congenial than Crispin's" as his poetic project matured in the thirties. It was not until he took up his genealogical study in the early forties that, according to Bates, Stevens resumed the connection with his native region that had been severed by his move to New York.Bates, p. 154 (See the main

essay for biographical details.)

Notes

References

* Bates, Milton. ''Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self''. 1985: University of California Press * Stevens, Holly. ''Letters of Wallace Stevens''. 1966: University of California Press. * Axelrod, Steven Gould and Helen Deese, ''Critical Essays on Wallace Stevens''. 1988: G.K. Hall & Co. {{DEFAULTSORT:Tea At The Palaz Of Hoon 1921 poems American poems Poetry by Wallace Stevens