Fans of bad Wallace Stevens criticism -- and there have turned out to be a few more of them than I expected -- will remember that this all started with a set of paragraphs that a college professor close to this blog wrote as cautionary examples of how not to analyze literature. This is another one from that original batch.
Ghosts
In my reading of the poem “Disillusionment of Ten o’Clock,” this poem is about ghosts. It reminds me of Scooby-Doo mysteries where the Scooby Gang wears bright clothes and where the ghosts are usually just villains wearing white sheets, which could be what the poem refers to when it says that the “houses are haunted by white nightgowns.” This makes sense to me because if you believe in ghosts, you know that spirits don’t come around where there are skeptical people, which is what the Scooby gang are, so that would explain why there aren’t any brightly colored clothes around there. And also in my interpretation, the drunk sailor is probably the henchman in the Scooby Doo show because the villain is usually a person with somebody working for him who is less educated and who does the dirty work, like a sailor. And also a lot of the old Scooby Doo episodes have ships in them. In other Scooby Doo episodes, they have old-fashioned costumes, which could be where the beaded belt and lace socks come from, with other villains dressing up as old-fashioned people or ghosts to scare people away from a supposably haunted house. This is why in my interpretation, the poem “Disillusionment of Ten o’Clock” is not only about ghosts but is about the faked ghosts in Scooby-Doo shows or something similar.
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