we have 1,500 words due on Wallace Stevens’ “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” and I’ve read it about ten times without being able to say what it means. How do you build an essay on a poem when you can’t paraphrase it?
First, you’ve picked one of the strangest short poems in the American canon, so you’re in very good company. People have been arguing about this one for a hundred years, and Stevens apparently liked it because it resisted easy explanation. Not understanding it straight away isn’t a sign you’re bad at poetry.
What helped me with a poem like this was dropping the question “what does it mean?” for a while and asking “what is literally happening?” With this poem you can actually get a long way:
There are two stanzas, eight lines each. The first is set in a kitchen, with someone (the “roller of big cigars”) being told to whip up curds, and wenches and boys hanging about. The second moves to a bedroom, where there’s a dead woman lying under a sheet she once embroidered, with her feet sticking out. So: a wake, a body upstairs and a party downstairs.
Once you’ve got that, the odd details start to look deliberate rather than random. Why ice cream at a funeral? Why does the poem fuss over a cheap dresser missing three glass knobs? Write those questions down. You don’t need to answer them yet. Each one is a possible paragraph, and a list of good questions is a much better starting point than a fake interpretation you don’t believe.
You’re closer than you think. Ten readings means you’ve noticed far more than you realize.
Building on @kamila_reads, here’s the mechanical version I use for any poem that won’t open up.
Step one: paraphrase line by line in plain English, even clumsily.
Step two: mark every line you can’t paraphrase. Be honest. In this poem I’d expect “Let be be finale of seem” to get marked by almost everyone.
Step three: look at what the unmarked lines have in common, and what the marked lines have in common. Often the unparaphrasable lines are abstract, while the clear lines are concrete objects.
Step four: your thesis lives where those two groups meet. If the concrete lines describe a cheap, ordinary funeral and the hard lines make grand statements about being and seeming, then the essay is about how the poem connects them.
That’s a plan in forty minutes.
I had this exact panic in my second year with Emily Dickinson’s “My Life had stood a Loaded Gun”. I’d read it maybe fifteen times. I could tell you that the speaker is a gun, that the gun belongs to an owner, that they go hunting together, and that the last stanza says the gun can kill but can’t die. I could not tell you what any of that was about. Love? Poetry? Violence? God? I genuinely didn’t know.
So I went to office hours expecting to be told the answer, and my professor, who was a bit of a provocateur, said the critics didn’t agree either and that I should write about why the poem makes agreement so hard. That felt like a cop-out at first. It wasn’t. The essay I ended up writing argued that the poem keeps offering a stable allegory and then breaking it, and that the final riddle about killing and dying is where the allegory finally collapses. I had to show, line by line, where each reading fits and where it stops fitting. That was way more close reading than I’d ever done when I thought I understood a poem.
The lesson I took away: confusion is evidence. If a line resists every reading you try, that resistance is a feature of the text, and you can describe it precisely. With the Stevens, I’d bet the line about “be” and “seem” works the same way. Track what each possible meaning would require, and you’ll have more than 1,500 words before you know it.
Agree with @essay_dario, with one condition: “the poem resists interpretation” is only a thesis if you show how, line by line. Otherwise it reads as an excuse.
Three rules.
Don’t read criticism until you’ve written your own observations. Afterwards, it’s useful. Before, it replaces your thinking.
Use precise hedges. “The line can be read as” is fine. “Maybe it sort of means” is not.
Anchor each paragraph to a specific word or image. “Concupiscent curds”, the missing knobs, the protruding feet. Close reading of small details carries an essay on a difficult poem far better than broad claims about death or reality.
This thread is so good. Have you tried reading it aloud yet? The sound of the first stanza is half the argument, and I think it’ll help you. Here’s how I’d put everyone’s advice together into an actual essay plan for this poem:
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Literal situation first (thanks @kamila_reads). A wake: kitchen party in stanza one, the body in stanza two. Write that in two sentences and keep it pinned above your desk.
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Find the tensions. Ice cream versus a corpse. Lush, almost greedy language in the kitchen (“concupiscent curds” is a ridiculous, delicious phrase) versus flat, plain description in the bedroom. Grand commands versus cheap furniture. Each tension is a paragraph.
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Pick your hardest line as the centre of the essay. “Let be be finale of seem” is the obvious one. You don’t have to solve it. You can lay out two or three readings (let reality put an end to pretending? let what is replace what appears?) and test each against the rest of the poem, like @essay_dario did with Dickinson.
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Use the refrain. Both stanzas end on “The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.” What does the line mean after the kitchen, and does it mean something different after we’ve seen the dead woman’s feet? That shift could literally be your thesis.
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Only then read a critic. Helen Vendler wrote brilliantly on Stevens, and you’ll get much more out of her once you have your own view to agree or argue with.
A possible thesis: the poem stages a funeral in which appetite and ordinary life refuse to give way to solemnity, and the refrain asks us to accept that the only lasting authority is the brief, physical present. You can disagree with that, which is exactly what makes it a thesis.
What angle are you leaning towards? And is your prof okay with you discussing the difficulty itself?