This is Episode 21 of Poems to Live Well By.

Today's poem is "The World as Meditation", by Wallace Stevens.

Wallace Stevens inhabited that halfway zone where maybe more and more of us find ourselves now: between the practical world of work and business, and the other world of spirituality and the mind. As a writer, his work made him a hero for a century of poets, but his day to day was as a legal executive for an insurance company for four decades.

This poem is a poem about what Stevens calls “meditation”. (In the written form, it includes an epigraph in French from the Romanian composer Georges Enesco, which translates as “'I have spent too much time performing on my violin, and traveling. But the essential exercise of the composer — meditation — nothing has ever interrupted that for me.”)

This, then, is a poem about the essential exercise of anyone who wishes to create. An exercise that is as much a communion with the world, the planet, the universe, as it is with those of us within it.

You can read the poem here.

Music Credit:

Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/