"…Like Swinburne, like Hart Crane, like Ashbery, Stevens is reduced by explanation. The incense of the words themselves can be so heady that readers swoon (you can see why, loving the effect, Blackmur was wary of the meaning). Such poets often seem translations of themselves—their poems might just as well be fanciful versions from Hungarian or Langue d’oc. If I prefer poems more complicated the more their effects are exposed (consider Eliot, or Lowell, or Hill—and think of Shakespeare), that is a preference armed as a prejudice. Stevens could write so well without recourse to his dress-up costumes and Masonic vestments (at times he seems decked out in the leavings of a theatrical trunk), it’s a pity that you have to wade through a great bog of minor work to get at poems that sharpen the responses of the imagination."

– William Logan, "The Sovereign Ghost of Wallace Stevens," http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_logan4.php

Streets of Baltimore, written by Glaser/Howard, Recorded by Gram Parsons on GP. Lyrics via CowboyLyrics. Thanks to the parents for bringing this to my attention.

Well, I sold the farm to take my woman where she longed to be–
We left our kin and all our friends back there in Tennessee.
And I bought those one-way tickets she had often begged me for,
And they took us to the streets of Baltimore.

Well, her heart was filled with gladness when she saw those city lights–
She said the prettiest place on earth was Baltimore at night.
Well, a man feels proud to give his woman what she’s longing for,
And I kind of like the streets of Baltimore.

Then I got myself a factory job, I ran an old machine,
And I bought a little cottage in a neighborhood serene–
And every night when I’d come home with every muscle sore,
She’d drag me through the streets of Baltimore.

Well I did my best to bring her back to what she used to be,
Then I soon learned she loved those bright lights more than she loved me.
Now I’m-a-going back on that same train that brought me here before,
While my baby walks the streets of Baltimore–
While my baby walks the streets of Baltimore.

while attempting to pull a monitor closer to me to see it more clearly, I found, instead, that the monitor was dragging me and my rolling chair towards it. There is a lesson here, if it could only be deciphered.

“His conduct was certainly not very gracious.”
“Ah, Watson,” said Holmes, smiling, “perhaps you would not be very gracious either, if, after all the trouble of wooing and wedding, you found yourself deprived in an instant of wife and of fortune. I think that we may judge Lord St. Simon very mercifully and thank our stars that we are never likely to find ourselves in the same position. Draw your chair up and hand me my violin, for the only problem we have still to solve is how to while away these bleak autumnal evenings.”

– A.C. Doyle, “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor,” The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, (178-179)