Gubbinal


"Gubbinal" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It is in the public domain according to Librivox.

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, 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.