Flowers at the Portal

In his essay Imagination as Value (from The Necessary Angel, 1942) Wallace Stevens lays out a case for "perceiving the normal," in contradistinction to "the deliberate exploits of the abnormal," as in the case of Rimbaud and Kafka:

"Jean Paulhan, a Frenchman and a writer, is a man of great sense. He is a native of the region of Tarbes. Tarbes is a town in southwestern France in the High Pyrenees. Marshal Foch was born there. An equestrian statue of the Marshal stands there, high in the air, on a pedestal. In his Les Fleurs de Tarbes, Jean Paulhan says:

One sees at the entrance of the public garden of Tarbes, this sign:

It is forbidden
To enter into the garden
Carrying flowers

He goes on to say:

One finds it, also, in our time at the portal of literature. Nevertheless, it would be agreeable to see the girls of Tarbes (and the young writers) carrying a rose, a red poppy, an armful of red poppies.

I repeat that Jean Paulhan is a man of great sense. But to be able to see the portal of literature, that is to say: the portal of the imagination, as a scene of normal love and normal beauty is, of itself, a feat of great imagination. It is the vista a man sees, seated in the public garden of his native town, near by some effigy of a figure celebrated in the normal world, as he considers that the chief problems of any artist, as of any man, are the problems of the normal and that he needs, in order to solve them, everything that the imagination has to give.”