Wallace Stevens- The Emperor of Ice Cream

Stevens' poem The Emperor of Ice Cream is a short, two stanza poem made up of two octaves. Stevens seems to be making an attempt to tell readers that no matter how good you are at something, humility is still the best attribute to have. The narrator of the poem is telling of taking people and putting them in situations they may otherwise be less likely to visit. For instance cigar rollers do not typically whip up curds in the kitchen, and when they do the results probably aren't tasty enough to be considered lustful. Whores usually try to work fast, so they can see as many clients as possible and make as much money as they can in a nights work. Yet the whores in the poem are slow to move and take payment in the form of cheap flowers. A dresser was bought, supposedly at a great price but is however lacking the knobs to open it. The girl sleeping in a sheet that she embroidered herself is covering her face instead of her feet, instead of just turning off the lamp. At the end of each stanza we see the phrase "The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream" repeated. This is a metaphor to say that when you feel like a king, the only mound you own is that lump of ice cream in your bowl.

The Wasteland

Like Joyce, Eliot proved to be difficult to follow at times, and yet at other times he was incredibly easy to follow. The Wasteland jumps around from perspective to perspective through the characters introduced throughout the poem. The poem itself is designed to be indicative of how people felt during, and around the first world war. The invention of Unreal City places a setting for Eliot's characters enabling them to have a sort of mysticism that wouldn't otherwise work in a more real world setting.