Very few degrees of separation

Wallace Stevens

Spike asked me this evening if I knew of a poet named Wallace Stevens.  I said I did / I do but couldn't recollect any of the poems.  Spike mentioned Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, which I vaguely recalled.  We looked at the poem on line and I remember being introduced to it years ago at Stirling University as one of the literary links between Poe's The Raven and William Carlos Williams's The Red Wheelbarrow.

Wallace Stevens wrote a poem called The Death of a Soldier, which I may have confused in my memory with a poem by Randall Jarrell.  I remember still the shock of reading the final line of The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.