Gubbinal Explained

"Gubbinal" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It is in the public domain according to Librivox.^[1]

Interpretation

It can be read as one of his "poems of epistemology", as B. J. Leggett styles it in his Nietzschean reading of Stevens' perspectivism,^[2] a minimalistic statement of his interest in the relationship between imagination and the world. The term 'gubbinal' may derive from 'gubbin', slang for a dullard, referring here to someone who takes the world to be ugly and the people sad.^[3]

Notes

1. Web site: COMPLETE: Public Domain Poems of W Stevens, Vol. 1 - PO/ez . LibriVox Forum . September 27, 2010 . October 13, 2010 . https://web.archive.org/web/20101013192959/http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4077 . dead .
2. Web site: On "The Snow Man" . Leggett . B. J. . September 27, 2010. Excerpted from Leggett, Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext, 1992, Duke University Press.
3. Nicholson, p. 23: "In somewhat arcane slang 'gubbin' means what it sounds like, a dull person --- the 'you' who insists on the sad ugliness of the world."

References

• Leggett, B.J. Early Stevens: The Nietzchean Intertext. 1982: Duke UP.
• Nicholson, Mervyn. "Reading Stevens' Riddles." College English, Vol. 50, No. 1. (Jan., 1988), pp. 13–31.
• Peterson, Margaret. Wallace Stevens and the idealist tradition. 1983: UMI Research Press