Empty, running on full

I am finding it difficult to have any thought directions after work. Not an idea in sight, tonight. Is that it? What about writers who worked full-time in the world of nine-to-five or six? Could one of them help? I pull out a volume of Wallace Stevens, senior insurance man, make a wish and open this

                                      Man and Bottle

                The Mind is the great poem of winter, the man,
                Who, to find what will suffice,
                Destroys romantic tenements
                Of rose and ice

                In the land of war. More than the man, it is
                A man with the fury of a race of men,
                A light at the centre of many lights,
                A man at the centre of men.

                It has to content the reason concerning war,
                It has to persuade that war is part of itself,
                A manner of thinking, a mode
                Of destroying, as the mind destroys,

                An aversion, as the world is averted
                From an old delusion, an old affair with the sun,
                An impossible aberration with the moon,
                A grossness of peace.

                It is not the snow that is the quill, the page.
                The poem lashes more fiercely than the wind,
                As the mind, to find what will suffice, destroys
                Romantic tenements of rose and ice.   

The poem is from his collection Parts of a World (1942). 

If the mind has something to do with the fury of a race of men, I am encouraged. That level of fury resonates with me. The link between the mind and destruction, I like. Aversion. Again, I'm encouraged. My mind may be rather empty at the moment, but I feel there is black fuel in the affective tank.

There is an emptiness about the rhetoric of the poem. The diction, the seriousness of it, of it being a poem, maybe there is something in the empty shell.

I have just remembered that I have a book by the Irish critic of modern American poetry Denis Donoghue and have just it picked it out and, of course, it does have an essay on Stevens.

Is the above serious criticism? Hardly but even if breaking the most basic rules, it leads somewhere, then perhaps it can be defended later.

Man and Bottle. I like the two meanings of bottle he is playing on, and the way it makes the title lighter than the poem. I am in need of a drink, and am still puzzled how Stevens wrote like this after a day in the office. I'm beat tonight, again, but encouraged.

                                                                                         To be continued