Marchand

Jean Hippolyte Marchand (1883-1940) was a French cubist painter [1] who is mentioned in Wallace Stevens' "Connoisseur of Chaos," a poem that appears in the Parts of a World collection (1942). According to Beverly Coyle, the poem features a speaker who studies order and disorder and thus becomes an expert. His expertise is illustrated in the poem through his use of aphorisms to make distinctions between abstraction and image, for example, in addition to disorder and order. [2] Marchand's brushstrokes provide an unmistakable example of order.
If all the green of spring was blue, and it is;                                                     
If the flowers of South Africa were bright
On the tables of Connecticut, and they are;
If Englishmen lived without tea in Ceylon, and they do;
And if it all went on in an orderly way,
And it does; a law of inherent opposities,
Of essential unity, is as pleasant as port,
As pleasant as the brush strokes of a bough,
An upper, particular bough in, say, Marchand. (II) [3]
==Notes==
1. Jean Marchand
2. Coyle 213.
3. Stevens in Kermode and Richardson 195.
==References==
Coyle, Beverly. "An Anchorage of Thought: Defining the Role of Aphorism in Wallace Stevens' Poetry." PMLA 91.2 (Mar. 1976): 206-22. Web. 20 Jan. 2014.
Jean Marchand
Stevens, Wallace. "Connoisseur of Chaos." Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. 194-5. Print.