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"Life is Motion" 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]
In Oklahoma,
Bonnie and Josie,
Dressed in calico,
Danced around a stump.
They cried,
"Ohoyaho,
Ohoo"...
Celebrating the marriage
Of flesh and air.
This playful poem is notable for its introducing exclamatory sounds, and for evoking the American frontier and the simple joy of calico-clad Bonnie and Josie. Stevens returns to Oklahoma, the venue for the first poem in Harmonium, "Earthy Anecdote", which charged a local scene with an aura of mystery. "Life is Motion" by contrast reduces locale to basics, suggesting in its own way that the poet must move beyond it as Crispin did in "The Comedian as the Letter C", even as this marriage of flesh and air is celebrated.
A symbolist reading would understand the flesh as reality, the air as imagination. The poem celebrates Stevens's task, to engage his imagination with reality.
A philosophically ambitious reading would view it as a poetic expression of a process philosophy like that of Alfred North Whitehead.
One critic wrote: "Of the modern poets, Wallace Stevens seem to me the most successful creator of artistic experiences which hum with the energy and motion of life." [2] See also "Metaphors of a Magnifico", where the debt to Cubist studies of motion is particularly evident.
Harmonium is a book of poetry by American poet Wallace Stevens. His first book at the age of forty-four, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. This collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines to several hundred. Harmonium was reissued in 1931 with three poems omitted and fourteen new poems added.
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