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"Poetry is the expression of the experience of poetry": Wallace Stevens' "Theoria" of belief

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"Poetry is the expression of the experience of poetry": Wallace Stevens' "Theoria" of belief

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"POETRY IS THE EXPRESSION OF THE EXPERIENCE OF POETRY":
WALLACE STEVENS' "THEORIA" OF BELIEF
by
John Charles Madruga
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 1998
Copyright 1998 John Charles Madruga
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90007
This dissertation, written by
A.°.m .......
under the direction of k is Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by Tne
Graduate School in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirements fo r the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
jr G raduate Studies
Date . . . 1 . ? . ? . ? .
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For Susan
ii
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Table of Contents
Chapter Three
A Response to Theory: Stevens "Theoria" of Poetry
Chapter Two
"Merely in living as and where we live":
Wallace Stevens and the Interiorization
of Belief
Chapter Three
Stevens' Factual Poetics: The Angel of Reality
and "Credences of Summer"
Chapter Four
"This is nothing until in a single man contained" :
Stevens' Moment of Poetry in Seven Poems
Chapter Five
A Violence From Within: Stevens and the Origin
of Poetry as Nobility and Calling
iii
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59
105
148
213
Abstract
In a collection of aphorisms entitled "Adagia, * Wallace
Stevens writes: "Poetry is the expression of the
experience of poetry' (OP 190) . While the expressions
of Stevens poetic experience may significantly vary, his
work generally attempts to discover, "Without the labor
of thought' (CP 248), in "A gaiety that is being [and]
not merely knowing' (CP 248) what he calls the "inner
position' (OP 253) of poetry. For Stevens, this "inner
position,' which I refer to as Stevens "interiorization
of belief,' is "to be found beneath the poet's word and
deep with in the reader's eye in those chambers in which
the genius of poetry sits alone with her candle in a
moving solitude' (OP 253) . And it is through the three
fold process of meditation, contemplation and enactment,
which I call Stevens' "theoria' of poetry, that he may
experience moments of belief, satisfaction, and
sanctification in poetry. The ultimate expression of
the experience of poetry is rendered in terms "a
particularity of the imagination' (NA 33) which he calls
"nobility.' For Stevens, nobility not only functions as
the source or origin of a poem's fundamental creative
ineffability, its more significant effect is that it is
"our spiritual height and depth' (NA 33), our source for
establishing and sustaining a living poetry to which
every reader or listener of poetry may engage.
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The manifold of possible meanings— and the category of
the meaningful is too static when applied to the
poetic— is the exponential product of all possible
sense or non-sense worlds as these are construed,
imagined, tested, indwelt through the interaction of
two liberties: that of the text, in movement across
time, and that of the receiver.
George Steiner, Real Presences
The poet must not adapt his experience to that of the
philosopher.
Wallace Stevens, "Adagia"
CHAPTER ONE:
A RESPONSE TO THEORY:
STEVENS' "THEORIA" OF POETRY
Stevens' Critics
For Stevens, the act of writing poetry is not
simply compositional, it is an activity of the most
august imagination to be lived and felt as a profound
fulfillment of lived experience— an act of satisfying
his belief in the complex sanctifying power of the poem
1
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itself. Stevens' expression of the experience of
poetry, however, is not only promulgated in poems, it
is also expressed in prose. Considering poetry to be
"one of the great subjects of study" (NA viii) , Stevens
wrote quite extensively on the subject, and attempted
to articulate— in personal letters, journal pieces,
essays and lectures— his feeling that poetry must be
viewed in light of the natural vibrations of "reality"
filtered through the "imagination" of the poet.
After more than several decades of Stevens
criticism, which is typically governed by particular
ideological positions ranging from R.P. Blackmur's New
Critical interpretations and its emphasis on "close
reading" to Melita Schaum's perspective of the work
from a Feminist critical foundation, critics still
generally consider Stevens' prose to be an
insignificant portion of his life work. Most
extremely. Merle Brown says, "The Necessary Angel and
even more the Letters, convince us that the poetic life
of Wallace Stevens is embodied in his poems, and only
there" (37) . Frank Kermode values the prose in terms
of how it may establish a theoretical foundation for
his own reading of the poetry. Kermode begins "The
Prose, " a chapter in his book, Wallace Stevens, with
the following justification: "[The prose] is dealt
with here because the greater part of it was written
2
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between 1942 and 1951, and because it is a useful
preliminary to the long poems of the forties" (79}. In
a similar vain, Joseph Riddel points out that "the only
contribution Stevens' poetics makes to modern thought
is the perspectives it offers on his poems . . .
Stevens' [essays] provide but few valid reflections on
the essential nature of the artist's presence, or on
the cultural phenomenon of his art" (41) . While
Stevens' poetry continues to place scholars at the
center of various contemporary critical debates, the
prose is typically dismissed as a kind of anti-poetic,
marginal theoretical criticism "in need of some
apology" (Kermode 79), and thus not worthy of serious
critical attention as fully creative in itself.
A Theory of Poetry
What seems to be the most problematical point of
contention among scholars surrounding Stevens' prose is
whether or not it constitutes a particular "theory of
poetry." If Stevens indeed manages to construct a
clear theoretical paradigm in prose, it is certainly
not an academic theory of poetics, metaphysics, or
aesthetics that is rendered. Given the complexity of
Stevens' prose subjects— the power of poetry to replace
religion in a time of disbelief, the figure/role of the
3
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poet, the relationship between poetry and the culture
in which it is produced, the subtle interplay of
reality and the imagination in the creation of poetry—
the prose never quite fulfills the description of
theoretical criticism as described by M.H. Abrams in A
Glossary of Literary Terms:
Theoretical criticism attempts to establish on
the basis of general principles, a set of terms,
distinctions, and categories to be applied to the
identification and analysis of literature, as
well as the criteria . . . by which these works
and their writers are to be evaluated (38) .
According to Abrams, theoretical criticism
justifies its search for meaning in literature from
outside the boundaries of literary construction, that
is, as an inherently "interior" creative act of the
mind of the writer in the act of perceiving and
interpreting the phenomenal world, in an enactment of
mind into language. Rather than allowing an individual
reader/viewer to interact with and affectively respond
to a poem, play, short story or novel on the level of
the interaction between the verbal expression of the
sensibility of the writer or composer and the response
to this expression by the reader/listener/viewer,
proponents of theoretical criticism often construct
their hermeneutic, as John Dewey points out in Art As
Experience, "through the application of a "ready-made
compartmentalization which spiritualizes art out of its
4
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natural connection to objects of concrete experience"
(10) . In so doing, readers, in the act of reading, may-
become critics not of the text itself but of the text's
relationship to a particular theoretical paradigm which
often operates independently (and sometimes in
opposition) from the ideas, images, and dilemmas which
the text presents.
In limiting one's imaginative encounter with a
literary text by essentially predetermining its meaning
on the basis of certain "general principles," or
"ready-made compartmentalizations," advocates of
theoretical criticism respond to artistic expression
through a particular belief system of an extraneous,
extratextual influence. George Steiner, in his book
Real Presences, locates the central force of this
"externalizing" influence of criticism in the very
environment dependent on criticism for its own
survival: the academy.
Steiner argues that the proliferation of
"academic-journalistic outpouring" (48) has generated a
massive number of metacritical texts more interested in
validating the integrity of their own ideological
foundations than recognizing the subtle imaginative and
experiential workings of artistic expression (poem,
play, novel, sonata, painting, sculpture, dance) as a
creative act. He writes:
5
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The primary text is only the remote font of
autonomous exegetic proliferation. The true
source of Z's tome are X's and Y's works on the
identical topic. In both rhetorical conventions
and substance, secondary texts are about
secondary texts (39).
For Steiner, theorists find themselves caught
between the need to decipher conclusive (or at least
convincing) meaning in artistic material and the very
nature of that material to represent reality in such a
way that the art resists such reasoned explanation and
essentialization. Critical acceptance of the
ineffability of artistic creation promulgated in a
criticism governed by meditation rather than
explication, experience rather than exegesis,
perception rather than paralysis, "theoria" rather than
theory, is often silenced by the number and power of
readers/viewers/listeners of art who announce, en mass,
what Steiner calls "the triumph of the theoretical"
(75). He further argues:
Those who proclaim and apply to poetic works a
"theory of criticism, " a "theoretical
hermeneutic" are, today the masters of the
academy and the exemplars in the high gossip of
arts and letters. Indeed, they have clarioned
"the triumph of the theoretical." They are, in
truth, either deceiving themselves or purloining
from the immense prestige and confidence of
science and technology an instrument
ontologically inapplicable to their own material
(75) .
The connection Steiner makes between "a
theoretical hermeneutic" and the eventual self-
6
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deception of the interpreter is explained through a
brief etymological and historical analysis of the word
"theory,* from its original use as "concentrated
insight . . . an act of contemplation focused patiently
on its objects" (89) to its modem significance as the
entertainment of speculative hypotheses (89). 1 For
one to engage the poetic force in art on any level
other than of its own creative expression of human
experience effectively dissolves the relationship
between artist and critic, as the experiential bond
between reader and text is refigured into a new
relationship between the artist's poetic expression and
enactment (perceptions of mind and imagination enacted
in the sound of words) and the critic's theoretical
predeterminations about that expression. 2 In the case
of Stevens' work, this enactment of mind and
imagination, which is as individual and mysterious and
ineffable in one poem as it is in the next, is itself a
virtual kind of resistance to the ultimate desire in
theoretical criticism to render conclusive
determinations about art. The desire Stevens maintains
to experience "that occasional ecstasy, or ecstatic
freedom of the mind, which is [the poet's] special
privilege" {NA 35), is suggestive of much more than a
willingness on his part merely to acknowledge the
ambiguity and rnysteriousness of experience, it is an
7
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acknowledgment of the poet's active engagement with
these transitive aspects of lived experience for the
purpose of transforming certain acknowledgments of the
world into "enactments" of poetry. 3 For Stevens,
these moments of transformation and enactment, what I
call Stevens' moment of poetry, are a centralizing and
sanctifying recognition of the prodigious potential of
the poet to "[feel] abundantly the poetry of
everything" (OP 190).
This aesthetic acknowledgment and enactment, if
viewed as an articulation of lived experience, merges
with the critic's response to the art object and
generates a patent communicative space in which
affective interpretation may take place. However, when
this critical space is governed by various "theories
which isolate art and its appreciation by placing them
in a structural realm of their own, disconnected from
other modes of experiencing . . . not inherent in the
subject-matter but aris[ing] because of specifiable
extraneous conditions" (Dewey 10), the critical
interpretation of the aesthetic creation often remains
bound primarily to the disclosures, debates,
determinations and definitions of the academy and not
to the experience, tone, sound, color and language of
the imaginative and transformative experience which
initiates an act of artistic creation.
8
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While "theoretical" or academic criticism may
distance readers from experientially engaging poetic or
aesthetic expression as experience, Stevens' prose,
which has been interpreted as "poetic theory" or as
"theoretical criticism," reveals poetic inspiration as
a condition of, and dependent on, "the life that is
lived in the scene [reality] composes" (NA 25) . Like
his poetry, Stevens' prose becomes the scene it
composes; it becomes, in essence, its own "theory," yet
it is not typically theoretical in the academic sense
or controlled by the teleological logic of theory. In
this respect, Stevens' writings on poetry and poetics
generally serve as examples of an open-ended logic and
experientially-based style. For Stevens, uses of
description, analogy and illustration, presented often
in a rather informal style of storytelling, are greatly
favored over attempts at defining his sense of poetry
and poetics.
For example, in Stevens' first essay/lecture, "The
Irrational Element in Poetry," delivered at Harvard
University in 1936, he manages to interpret a rather
ordinary experience as a "transposition of an objective
reality to a subjective reality" (OP 224) . For
Stevens, this act of transposition, fictionalized as an
"inner-transformation" of an external reality
(signifying the physicality of the scene perceived)
9
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into a subtilized, internal reality (it is internalized
and made "unreal" in the imagination) , initiates a
profound and necessary moment for any artist; it is a
moment Stevens refers to as a "pretext for poetry." He
writes:
A day or two before Thanksgiving we had a light
fall of snow in Hartford. It melted a little by
day and then froze again at night, forming a
thin, bright crust over the grass. At the same
time, the moon was almost full. I awoke once
several hours before daylight and as I lay in bed
I heard the steps of a cat running over the snow
under my window almost inaudibly. The faintness
and strangeness of the sound made on me one of
those impressions which one so often seizes as
pretexts for poetry (OP 224) .
This example demonstrates the elusive yet
intriguing nature of Stevens' work: moments of poetry
are experienced in the everyday life the poet leads and
the particular ability he/she brings to the experience
as an always already poeticized scene. For Stevens,
the poet must identify with the "faintness and
strangeness" of the everyday so that things are viewed
not in terms of their representational quality (the
thing is) , but in terms of the vibrations of their
ontological conditionality (the thing is and is not) .
As Stevens' Thanksgiving scene suggests, the world is
represented by things in-between initiation and
completion, as snow is both present and absent, the
moon is almost full, it is neither light (day) or dark
10
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(night) and the movement of the cat is heard but
Stevens describes the sound as almost inaudible.
Stevens' felt connection to the extraordinary within
the ordinary and to the importance of the process of
things completing themselves, including the completion
of the poem from its initial status as a "pretext, "
directs his attention not only toward "what happens,
but the music of what happens" (Vendler, The Music of
What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics 3).
Emerson and Others
Stevens' transformations of the everyday into a
"pretext for poetry" may be linked to Emerson's notion
of transubstantiation. As John McDermott explains in
Steams of Experience: Reflections on the History and
Philosophy of American Culture:
Emerson praises [the] human capacity to render
the activities and things of the world as more
than they be, as simply taken or simply had.
With Emerson the task is to use our "power of
imagination" so as to clothe the world of the
everyday with immortality, else we become dead to
ourselves (204).
Given the manner, style and affect of Stevens'
experientially based transformational aesthetic, his
work continually illustrates his intense interest in
poetry not as theory, that is, as "classification," of
11
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"translation" or "explanation" but as something which
is reflective of the artist's continually imaginative
and parallactic perceptions of a phenomenal world which
is both changeable and resistant to change. In this
respect, Stevens' own writings on poetry,
"spiritualizes" only that which governs its own
production— the poetic process of living out the
reality of experience through the particularities of
imagination in such a manner as Emerson prescribes in
"Poetry and Imagination." He writes: "The test of the
poet is to take the passing day, with its news, its
cares, its fears, as he shares them, and hold it up to
a divine reason, till he sees it to have a purpose and
beauty" (Poirier The Renewal of Literature 211) .
In a lecture of 1859 Emerson provides further
context for the notion that poetry be viewed in terms
of its potential to discover, beyond the significations
of the author's words, what Stevens calls "the organic
center of all movement of time and space--which [the
artist] calls the mind or heart of creation" [NA 174) .
Emerson writes:
Criticism is an art when it does not stop at the
words of the poet, but looks at the order of his
thoughts and the essential quality of his mind.
Then the critic is poet. 'Tis a question not of
talents but of tone; and not particular merits,
but the mood of mind into which one and another
can bring us (Poirier The Renewal of Literature
211) .
12
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Following Emerson's directive that criticism
address its attention to the "essential quality of [the
poet's] mind," Georges Poulet, in "Criticism and the
Experience of Inferiority, " locates a kind of central
position for this kind of Emersonian critical
reflection in the mind and heart of the reader. In
this respect, just as Stevens' texts or poems may be
viewed as an enactment of an interiorized process of
complex experience represented in language as a quality
of mind, the reader, according to Poulet, must also
engage the artistic/literary work on these levels of
inferiority in order to recognize the text's own
expression of a particular perception and understanding
of existence. Poulet writes:
At this moment what matters to me most is to
live, from the inside, in a certain identity with
the work and the work alone. It could hardly be
otherwise. Nothing external to the work could
possibly share the extraordinary claim which the
work now exerts on me. It is there within me,
not to send me back, outside itself, to its
author, nor to his other writings, but on the
contrary to keep my attention riveted on itself.
It is the work which traces in me the very
boundaries within which this consciousness will
define itself. It is the work which forces on me
a series of mental objects and creates in me a
network of words, beyond which, for the time
being, there will be no room for other mental
objects or for other words. And it is the work,
finally, which, not satisfied thus with defining
the content of my consciousness, takes hold of
it, appropriates it, and makes of it that I
which, from one end of try reading to the other,
presides over the unfolding of the work, of the
single work which I am reading (62).
13
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What Poulet manages to do in these few words is, I
believe, to overturn completely the emphasis of
contemporary theory-based criticism— which appropriates
the interiority of literary texts for the purpose of
promulgating a "valid" interpretation--by suggesting
that it is actually the text ("the work") which
naturally appropriates the reader to its particular
perspective and source of power, and thus produces the
possibility of a criticism for the reader which
"live[s] , from the inside, in a certain identity with
the work" (62) . Here the function of the reader is not
passive in relationship to the work. By striving to
engage art on the level of mind, perspective,
consciousness, and sensibility, the reader is placed in
a most active role as fellow meaning-maker with the
creator of the work. At this moment Barthes' idea of
the omnipotent and omnipresent Author God is dissolved
into thin air as the minds of the author and reader
merge and bring the artistic work into existence.
However, while works of literature naturally represent
their own perception, style and tone, academic
(didactic) criticism often exists in its own, very
different epistemological space. The remarkable
position Poulet describes for the critic/reader is an
identification with the text in a similar manner to
which the writer constructs his/her particular vision,
14
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and thus writer and reader are joined in a phenomenal
and existential creative connection. Given Poulet's
position for criticism, the act of writing the text
(the poem, play, novel), therefore, approaches the act
of writing about the text, as he says: "The work lives
its own life within me; in a certain sense, it thinks
itself and even gives itself a meaning within me" (62) .
The aim of such a criticism is to enlarge, and not
teach, what is of "central interest" (OP 262) to the
work: the characteristic prodigiousness of poetry.
Helen Vendler writes in The Music of What Happens that
The aim of a properly aesthetic criticism, then,
is not primarily to reveal the meaning- of an art
work or disclose (or argue for or against) the
ideological values of an art work. The aim of an
aesthetic criticism is to describe the art work
in such a way that it cannot be confused with any
another art work (not an easy task) , and to infer
from its elements the aesthetic that might
generate this unique configuration (2) .
What Vendler describes as a "properly aesthetic
criticism" is the undertaking of a literary perspective
which focuses on what Stevens often refers to as an
ineffable "centre" or moment of poetry. T.S. Eliot
writes in "On Poetry and Criticism" of this
fundamental, "unaccountable" element in poetry:
I am even prepared to suggest that there is, in
all great poetry, something which must remain
unaccountable however complete might our
knowledge of the poet, and that is what matters
most. When the poem has been made, something new
has happened , something that cannot be wholly
15
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explained by anything that went before. That, I
believe, is what we mean by "creation" (124).
The rather simplistic distinction Eliot makes
between the ineffability or "unaccountability" of
poetry and the tendency of criticism to interpret
poetry in terms of a processional of anyone or
"anything that went before places the critic in a
rather ambiguous position of critical power, whereby it
may become necessary for the critic to "leave out
whatever in a poem is not to their purposes, or
[distort] , in the services of argument, what they do
find to describe" (Vendler 3). As Harold Bloom, for
example, interprets Stevens' work within the context of
the Romantic tradition of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats,
Tennyson, Pater, Ruskin, Nietzsche, Emerson, Whitman,
and Dickinson, initiating the critical task from such a
position of a priori ideological influence creates a
style of critical inquiry which may continue to
explicate a great number of literary and ideological
issues, interests and ideas, but only at the expense of
the critic's primary subject or focus of perception,
what Allen Grossman calls the "source of poetic
discourse, the invocation" (230) .
An Approach to Stevens
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In “On Poetry and Criticism" T.S. Eliot warns his
reader of the consequences of an excess of ideological
critical activity when he asks: "But perhaps we can do
something to save ourselves from being overwhelmed by
our own critical activity, by continually asking such a
question as: when is criticism not literary criticism
but something else?" (117) . Stevens, writing in the
guise of a literary critic, clearly promulgates the
foundation of his own particular critical bias or
purpose in his essay "Two of Three Ideas." In response
to the question "But where does the poem come in?"
Stevens answers with the following statement:
And if my answer to that is that I am concerned
primarily with the poem and that my purpose this
morning is to elevate the poem to the level of
one of the major significances of life and to
equate it, for the purposes of discussion, with
gods and men, I hope it will be clear that it
comes in as the central interest, the fresh and
foremost object (OP 262).
What Stevens describes here as his purpose "to
elevate the poem to one of the major significances of
life" reflects Eliot's concern that literary criticism
concern itself with specific matters of literary (text-
and author-centered) production and not "something
else" (117) . Generally, this is the nature of the
criticism poets on Stevens generally have written; it
is a style of criticism which, as Louis Zukofsky
writes, attempts to document the "steps in the
17
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excursion of a poet who wish[es] to imbue criticism
with something of the worth and method of his craft"
(xi) .
Given the dominance in the academy of various
theoretical critical perspectives applied to poetry and
the poem, this Emerson-Poulet-Eliot-Stevens-Zukofsky
directive for criticism seems to be followed most
closely either by poets, who seem to be more fully
aware of Rilke's statement that "works of art are of an
infinite loneliness, and nothing so little as criticism
can reach them, " or by readers who assent to Alfred
Kazin's claim that "What gets us closer to a work of
art is not instruction but another work of art. Only a
plurality of choices can open up the new thinking in a
work of literature that excites and liberates us"
(Writing Was Everything 7) . In essence, this critical
directive seems to be best suited to the poet-as-critic
(or, I suppose, the critic-as-poet) , one devoted not to
the theoretical predilections and determinations of
theory-driven, academic criticism, but to the
imaginative tone, sound, color and complexity of poetry
itself.
Although the criticism by poets on Stevens' work
is as individual as each poet's own particular poetry,
there seems to be a common ideological influence among
the writing. 4 Just as Emerson, Poulet, Eliot,
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Zukofsky and Stevens all stress the idea that the
work— the text, the poem— be “the fresh and foremost
object" of critical consideration, so do the poets who
write (and have written) about Stevens' poetry.
Generally, the goal of the poet-as-critic is to enlarge
the poem, to give readers a sense of the breath of
thought and feeling of poetry, as well as its
characteristic tone and color. In short, the poet-as-
critic generally interprets the poem as a creation of
sound, image, form and perspective and not as means to
demonstrate a particular aesthetic, philosophical,
historical, sociological or political ideology.
By 1951, Stevens had been labeled, among other
things, a hedonist, a solipsist, an imagist, a
Platonist, a Romantic, an Impressionist, a philosopher,
and a Pointillist. Moreover, his poetry had been
interpreted in connection with American, French, and
British literary traditions. Melita Schaum points out
that as a poet, "Stevens . . . has been at the center
of a number of major critical controversies of the
twentieth century, from the early emergence of the New
Criticism through the past decade's battles over
poststructuralism" (Wallace Stevens and the Feminine
ix) . However, as these various theories of critical
reading have rivaled one another for a position of
authority in Stevens studies, and as theory-based
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criticism continues to be the life-blood of these
studies, the idea that poetry is, as Stevens was fond
of stating, "one of the sanctions of life .. . a vital
engagement between man and his environment of the
world" (OP 252) loses its significance amid the
pressure of the theoretical.
The debate between poet Conrad Aiken and
poet/critic Louis Untermeyer in the May 10, 1919, issue
of The New Republic marks the first time Stevens' name
was mentioned in any published critical context and
serves as an appropriate example of the way in which
academic and non-academic critical positions resist one
another. Stevens himself was resistant to the
posturings of the academy as well as the criticisms its
proponents placed on the nature of his work. Perhaps a
more fitting way to consider various critical
perspectives on Stevens is not to merely review what
the academy has written--since as I have pointed out
earlier, much of academic criticism is governed by a
particular theory of reading and not by what has been
read— but rather to consider what poets have written
about Stevens' work. From this perspective a more
immediate, sensory, experiential kind of poetic
criticism may be given voice and allowed to encounter
and interact with Stevens' own particular poetic
sensibility, tone, linguistic play, and joy of thought
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and language (the language of thought) which comprise
the writing itself. In other words, it is simply the
aim of this criticism to make poetry— and not theories
of poetry— better known.
The Aiken Untermeyer debate, played out in the
pages of The New Republic, anticipates the nature of
research and explication on Stevens' work over the
following years. This is not simply due to the fact
that questions surrounding the Aiken-Untermeyer debate
were in regard to more than the merits and faults of
certain poets and schools of poetry. More important,
the debate was essentially one of critical methodology.
As Melita Schaum points out in Wallace Stevens and the
Critical Schools, it reflect[ed] the two essential— and
essentially antagonistic--ideologies in early
twentieth-century American criticism which battled over
Stevens' inclusion in the canon" (35).
Untermeyer summarizes the nature of the debate in
"The Ivory Tower II," his response to Aiken's review of
Untermeyer's The New Era in American Poetry:
The conflict is caused not so much by a dispute
in preferences and matters of taste as by the
direct impact of two opposed theories--not the
difference between two religions but, what is
usually productive of far greater violence, the
manner of worship. Roughly generalizing, the two
tendencies might be summed up as the aesthetic
policy in art and the humanistic toward it (60) .
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However accurate this statement is in describing
the general nature of the Aiken-Untermeyer controversy
(Aiken, a poet, who was at this time an advocate of
aesthetic principles in art, and Untermeyer, best known
as an anthologist, who was an exponent of a
"humanistic" hermeneutic) , its larger significance on
Stevens scholarship is present in the idea that the
"manner of worship, " or ideology of reading poetry, is
privileged over the "religion" itself— poetry.
Nevertheless, in his review of Untermeyer's book,
Conrad Aiken clearly proclaims his faith in a style of
poetry
which delivers no message, is imbued with no
doctrine, a poetry which exists only for the sake
of magic,— magic of beauty on the one hand, magic
of reality on the other . . . both struck at
through a play of implication than through
matter-of-fact statement (60).
and thus he promulgates his criticism of Untermeyer's
"consistent and well-edged policy" (59) of interpreting
the "new era" in American poetry in terms of a critical
structure of three tenets: "Americanism, lustihood, and
democracy" (59).
For Aiken, it is Untermeyer's nationalistic and
sociological critical bias, and therefore his failure
to view the poem as a supremely aesthetic expression,
which causes the shortsightedness of his argument.
Aiken writes that Mr. Untermeyer:
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allows nationalistic and sociological
considerations to play an equal part with the
aesthetic. To put it curtly, he likes poetry
with a message— poetry which is, politically,
from his viewpoint, on the right side. Surely he
must perceive the shortsightedness and essential
viciousness of this? (59).
The effect of such a critical bias, according to
Aiken is that it slowly canonizes, by "casting into
undue prominence" (59) , a select group of poets whose
work represents Untermeyer's own interpretive method
rather than recognizes "the circumstances, the emotions
out of which [poetry] springs" (60). And so for
Untermeyer, early twentieth-century poetry finds its
leaders in the "Americanism" of Edgar Lee Masters,
Robert Frost, E.A. Robinson and Any Lowell; in the
"democracy" of Auturo Giovanniti, Charles Erskine Scott
Wood , James Oppenheim, Carl Sandburg, Alter Brody, and
Lola Ridge (59). The poets who do not fulfill
Untermeyer's critical bias— those he labels the "Pound-
Stevens-Arensberg-Others" group— are dismissed as
writers concerned with "The over-nice preoccupation
[of] shades, the elaborate analysis of a spent emotion,
the false emphasis on half-lights or a novel technique
[which] lead inevitable to The Yellow Book [or] to mere
verbal legerdemain (61). Yet, it is on the levels of
emotion, subtlety and technique that Aiken uses the
aesthetic-based principle of "Art is art,--not
sociology, not philosophy" (60), to call into question
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Untermeyer's interpretation of what he mockingly refers
to as "the finer note in contemporary poetry" (60).
Aiken's critical approach, which he admits is "as
parti pris in one direction as Mr. Untermeyer's [is] in
another" (60), indeed emphasizes the critic's
responsibility to discover in poetry its "finer note."
That is, for Aiken criticism must recognize that:
poetry should be a perfectly formed and felt work
of art: and the greater the elaboration and
subtlety consistent with such perfection the more
inexhaustible will it be [and] the longer it
endure" (60).
Although Untermeyer was quick to reject Aiken's
"aesthetic preoccupations" (60), it is not a wholly
aesthetic-based method of criticism Aiken defends in
his review, as he says, "Art has a human function to
perform. It has no right to cloister itself, to
preoccupy itself solely with beauty" (59). 5 What
Aiken does advocate for criticism is that it consider
the art object, not only in relation to concepts of
"truth" and "beauty" but also in terms of its capacity
to reflect the vital and virtual processes of human
life.
Following Aiken's lead in supporting a general
criticism which views the poem as primarily a "formed
and felt work of art" (60), Randall Jarrell was perhaps
the most passionate about writing on the poetry of his
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time (1935-1964) and, like Aiken, much admired the
poetry of Wallace Stevens. For Jarrell, the act of
writing criticism was very similar to the act of
writing literature, as both are governed by an
imaginative impulse to reveal the far-ranging,
imaginative and profoundly individual moments of
experience which direct literature. According to
William Pratt, Jarrell's criticism
makes us aware that criticism and literature
nourish each other, and that, at its best, as in
much that Jarrell wrote criticism is literature:
all the style, the imagination, the truthfulness
are there, to make us read with wonder and
delight, and hope to remember what we have read,
word for word (478) .
While the critical act fundamentally remains an
act of possessing the language, style and sensibility
of the writer, Jarrell's criticism does not aim to
control the poem "in savage scrutiny" (CP 376) but to
simply receive it and respond to its own particular
expression of existence. Stanley Cavell, in a
discussion of Emerson's and Thoreau's relation to
poetry in their own writing, points out that
Such writing takes the same mode of relating to
itself as reading and thinking do, the mode of
the self's relation to itself, call it self-
reliance. Then whatever is required in
possessing a self will be required in thinking
and reading and writing. This possessing is
not— it is the reverse of— possessive; I have
implied that in being an act of creation, it is
the exercise not of power but of reception (135) .
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Cavell points out here what seems to be a
fundamental distinction between a theory-driven
criticism, which often uses literature to promulgate a
conclusive position of extratextual, ideological power,
and a non theory-driven criticism, which acknowledges
and promulgates an altogether different kind of power:
the power of literary/poetic expression to enact "The
essential poem at the centre of things, / The arias
that spiritual fiddling make" (CP 440) .
Although Jarrell spent many years working and
teaching within the academic community, he was never
associated with a particular school of criticism.
Helen Vendler writes of Jarrell's critical stance and
method in his Third Book of Criticism in the following
way:
[Jarrell] was, for better or worse, a member of
no school of criticism; he was no theorist; he
felt happier writing about the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries than about earlier periods
where what you see in what you read depends
radically on historical information; he wrote
always to "show others" and not to muse to
himself. He was not, in short, a Frye, an
Auerbach, a Blackmur, an Auden. On the other
hand, his mind was anything but simple. No
reader or poetry, however devoted, could fail to
learn in generous amounts from his superlative
essays on modern poetry" {Part of Nature, Part of
Us 115-116) .
Jarrell's essays on Stevens indeed demonstrate his
devotion to the potential of a modem poetry "that
shows us the 'celestial possible' [of] everything that
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has not yet been transformed into the infernal
impossibilities of our everyday earth" (The Third Book
of Criticism 165). Thus, in order for Jarrell to write
on Stevens' works within this kind of Stevensian
framework of the "celestial possible," he openly
disregards all claims of interpretive certainty and
admits that
The Collected Poems of such a poet as Stevens—
hundred and thousands of things truly observed or
rightly imagined, profoundly meditated upon--is
not anything one can easily become familiar with.
Setting out on Stevens for the first time would
be like setting out to be an explorer of Earth
(56) .
For Jarrell, criticism, like poetry, should be an
expression of one's own meditation, contemplation and
enactment of poetic experience; it is on these levels
of an experiential poetics that Jarrell sets out to
explore the nature of Stevens' work. The result is
that Jarrell's criticism becomes a kind of critical
reflection and elaboration of Stevens' own sense of
things. As Jarrell has stated, the experience of
reading Stevens "seems to us that we are feeling, as it
is not often possible for us to feel, what it is to be
human; the poem's composed, equable sorrow is a kind of
celebration of our being" (The Third Book of Criticism
59). Such an experience of reading Stevens determines
that Jarrell's criticism on Stevens center on the idea
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of Stevens' poetry as an enlargement of life, and as a
meditation on Stevens' own idea that "poetry is the
expression of the experience of poetry" (OP 190) .
Jarrell writes:
How much there is [in Stevens] of the man who
looks, feels, meditates, in the freedom of
removedness, of disinterested imagining, of
thoughtful love! As we read the poems we are
continually aware of Stevens observing,
meditating, creating, that we feel like saying
that the process of creating the poem is the
poem. Surprisingly often the motion of
qualification, of concession, of logical
conclusion— a dialectical motion in the older
sense of dialectical— is the movement that
organizes the poem; and in Stevens the unlikely
tenderness of this movement— the one, the not-
quite-that, the other, the not-exactly-the-other,
the real one, the real other--is like the
tenderness of the sculptor or draftsman, whose
hand makes but looks as of it caressed (63-64) .
Here Jarrell is able to place his reader (as well
as himself as a reader of Stevens) at what seems to be
the focal point of both the creative and critical act
he experiences: the particular organizational
dialectical movement of the poem or essay. At once
Jarrell celebrates Stevens' poetic complexity and
subtlety of creation in the "unlikely tenderness" of
the dialectical motion of qualification or concession,
while at the same allows his own essay to exist within
a similar organizational space where "the one, the not-
quite-that, the other, the not-exactly-the-other, the
real one, the real other" (Jarrell 63-63) all function
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in the creation and movement of his own reading of
S tevens' work.
In Stevens Jarrell discovers not so much the
opportunity to interpret the poems as to interact with
their "many new tastes and colors and sounds, many
real, half-real, and nonexistent beings" (Jarrell 71).
In this sense, although Stevens' work becomes viewed
in light of a particularly unique didactic quality
whereby "he has spoken, always, with the authority of
someone who thinks himself a source of interest"
(Jarrell 71) , Jarrell also points out that Stevens
"never felt it necessary to appeal to us, make a hit
with us, nor does he try to sweep us away, to overawe
us; he has written as if poems were certain to find, or
make, their true readers" (Jarrell, 71) . As Jarrell
points out in his essay, the quality of Stevens'
disinterestedness, the "unlikely tenderness," the "sigh
of awe, of wondering pleasure" (67) and the "dignity
and elegance and intelligence" (73) of his sensations
and reflections direct as well as correspond to
Jarrell's own reading of The Collected Poems and
provide a kind of example of not only Stevens' poetic
enactments but the nature of Jarrell's critical act as
well. It is as if Jarrell has employed Stevens' work
as a reminder that poetry, as well as the criticism of
poetry, are able to
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see, feel, and think with equal success; they
treat with mastery that part of existence which
allows of mastery, and experience the rest of it
with awe or sadness or delight. Minds of this
quality of genius, of this breath and delicacy of
understanding, are a link to between us and the
past, since they are, for us, the past made
living; and they are our surest link with the
future, since they are part of us which the
future will know (Poetry and the Age 146).
Stevens' Response to Criticism: A "Theoria" of
Poetry-
Beginning with Stevens scholars and moving to such
thinkers as Dewey, Steiner, Emerson, Poulet, Eliot,
Zukofsky, Aiken, Untermeyer, Vendler and Jarrell, we
finally arrive at Stevens' own response to the various
questions of theory which seem to always surround his
work. Stevens' response to theory, like his response
to most questions about poetry, is most forcibly
articulated in poetry. Stevens' notion that the
experience of poetry as something lived, felt and
perceived through the imaginative sensibility and
particularity of experience of the poet resists the
idea of poetic theory as something founded merely on a
speculative hypothesis and initiates, instead, the
beginning of what I call Stevens' "theoria," that is,
first a meditation, next a contemplation, and finally,
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an envisioning and enactment of the experience of
poetry. 2
Meditation
The Thanksgiving scene which Stevens describes so
vividly in the example from "The Irrational Element in
Poetry" is transformed into "an unwritten rhetoric that
is always changing and to which the poet must always be
turning" (OP 231) , so that he may "find in poetry that
which gives us a momentary existence on an exquisite
plane" (OP 228). This "unwritten rhetoric" of Stevens'
poetic "theoria" reveals itself as an emergence, a
becoming of poetry from the silences and obscurities of
the physical scene as it is subtilized in the mind of
the artificer. The paradoxical articulated silence
("faint and strange") of the cat's "almost inaudible"
movement, and the hidden presence of earth as it is
covered by the opacity of grass and snow, may typically
signify an act of veiling the reality of things as they
are. Stevens however offers these images in a process
of becoming made, as an awakening of the mind, and as
the poet's heightened awareness of poetry in the
silences and absences inherent in the subtle unfolding
of this real/unreal scene. In the subtleties,
variances, and veils of sound and image, the scene
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gradually and naturally reveals itself to Stevens' mind
as a meditation of thought; it is revealed not in terms
of the substance of things but rather in terms of their
observed essence or "suchness."
William W. Bevis, in Mind of Winter: Wallace
Stevens, Meditation, and Literature, points out that:
Meditative perception by a relatively quiet,
passive self saying little more than * there it
is,' underlies many Stevens passages of
nothingness, or of the thing in itself purely
perceived— the Buddhists call this a perception
of suchness, a word with a specifically
meditative denotation (11).
There is indeed a quality of meditative suchness
to the scene Stevens' describes in "The Irrational
Element in Poetry, " as his description arises from a
mind that is unselective, passive, even unfocused and
untuned to some degree; and yet, in the experiential
passivity of selfless and quiet listing he becomes
finely focused and tuned-in to not what the scene means
as interpretation but what it offers to him as
potential poetry. In this state of meditative
perception, intellectualization and/or the expectation
of a necessary or logical conclusion to the perception
never becomes a necessary consideration. According to
Bevis:
Meditative passivity probably depends not only on
an absence of emotional and muscular response,
which one could characterize as intellectual
detachment as well, but also on the absence of
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tuning, the goal-directed selection as focusing
that usually accompany sensation, making our
sensation sharp in certain ways . . . and dull in
others (128) .
The "detachment" of the intellect in this manner
allows Stevens to engage the vibrations of things as
they are revealed to him— either becoming made or
fading into nothingness— without the evasion of
analysis, interpretation or contextualization. The
scene comes to provide the makings of a future scene, a
refiguration of the original experience, enacted as
poetry. The poet's awareness of the vibrations of life
is an awareness of the
Sounding in transparent dwellings of the self.
Impalpable habitations that seem to move
In the movement of the colors of the mind.
The far-fire flowing and the dim-coned bells
Coming together in a sense in which we are
poised,
Without regard to time or where we are,
In the perpetual reference, object
Of the perpetual meditation, point
Of the enduring, visionary love (CP 466) .
For Stevens, perpetual meditation indeed leads to
a point of vision, a particular point of experienced
insight, freedom, and acceptance of the phenomenal
world. It is Stevens' desire to sound the "transparent
dwellings of the self ... In the movement of the
colors of the mind" (CP 466) , free from thought, free
even from metaphor and abstraction, which seems to
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guide his life in poetry. For Stevens, the
concentration of the poet is to be involved in a kind
of Emersonian unification and meditation on the
immediacy, fecundity, flux and flow of a surrounding
and ever-changing extraordinary scene, "Free from
everything else, free above all from thought" (OP,
133) . Emerson writes of the importance of detachment
in his essay "Art":
The virtue of art lies in detachment, in
sequestering one object from the embarrassing
variety. Until one thing comes out from the
connection of things, there can be enjoyment,
contemplation, but no thought .... It is the
habit of certain minds to give an all-excluding
fullness to the object, the thought, the word,
they alight upon, and to make that for the time
the deputy of the world. These are the artists,
the orators, the leaders of society. The
power to detach, and to magnify by detaching is
the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the
orator and the poet (147) .
Stevens' 1938 poem, "The Latest Freed Man,"
described by William Bevis as "perhaps the very best
example of Stevens as meditative phenomenologist"
(112), beautifully exemplifies Stevens' desire for
poetry to inhabit a place of meditative consciousness
and concentration and to apply this focus of detachment
to the magnifying power of poem itself.
The Latest Freed Man
Tired of the old descriptions of the world.
The latest freed man rose at six and sat
On the edge of his bed. He said,
"I suppose there is
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A doctrine to this landscape. Yet having just
Escaped from the truth, the morning is color and
midst.
Which is enough: The moment's rain and sea.
The moment's sun (the strong man vaguely seen).
Overtaking the doctrine of this landscape. Of him
And of his works, I am sure. He bathes in the
midst
Like a man without a doctrine. The light he
gives—
It is how he gives his light. It is how he
shines,
Rising upon the doctors in their beds
And on their beds. . . "
And so the freed man said.
It was how the sun came shining into his room:
To be without a description of to be,
For a moment on rising, at the edge of the bed,
to be,
To have the ant of the self changed to an ox
With its organic boomings, to be changed
From a doctor into an ox, before standing up.
To know that the change and that the ox-like
struggle
Come from the strength that is the strength of
the sun,
Whether it comes directly or from the sun.
It was how he was free. It was how his freedom
came.
It was being without description, being an ox.
It was the importance of the trees outdoors,
The freshness of the oak-leaves, not so much
that they were oak-leaves, as the way they
looked.
It was everything being more real, himself
At the centre of reality, seeing it.
It was everything bulging and blazing and big in
itself.
The blue of the rug, the portrait of Vidal,
Qui fait fi des joliesses banales, the chairs (CP
204-5).
Stevens' poem begins at a particular point of
visionary change. "Tired of the old descriptions of
the world, / The latest freed man rose at six and sat
on the edge of his bed" to contemplate a new edge, a
new margin of consciousness and realization. The
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actual physical transition the doctor (who personifies
Stevens' notion of the latest freed man curing himself)
makes from sleep to wakeful awareness signifies, as the
poem proceeds, an awakening of a much greater
importance: He is transformed into an personal and
pervading experience of the freedom of perception, and
it is this experience which becomes the center of
Stevens' poem and thus awakens the mind to a new vision
of the world.
Having "Escaped from the truth, * the idea of a
doctrine governing the doctor's vision is replaced with
the acceptance of meditative, momentary visions of
light and color, the "organic boomings" of a new self
"At the centre of reality," seeing "everything bulging
and blazing and big in itself" (CP 204) . "Like a man
without a doctrine," the doctor initially expands the
idea of himself, as well as his idea of the world,
through a process of retreating into and accepting a
new knowledge of reality. As William Bevis writes, the
beginning of the poem is "dominated by escape from
doctrinal thought, by what we might call criticisms of
views of the real, and by some kind of pure
concentration on present sensation as the doctor sits
on his bed in the morning light" (114) . However, as
much as the doctor escapes from "the old descriptions
of the world, " "a vivid sense of being, here and now,
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emerges" (Bevis, 113) so that he may be as the sun ("It
was how the sun came shining into his room / To be
without a description of to be"): wholly contained,
self-illuminating and completely free from "the
doctrine of this landscape." But what is the result of
this escape and subsequent freedom?
The result is, in effect, a kind of non-result, a
non-conclusion. Having spoken his mind, the doctor not
only silences those dominant and dominating aspects of
the world controlled by doctrine, he also silences
himself by adopting an understanding of all things
through the silence, passivity and defenselessness of
experiential listening. Without a language, a
doctrine, a landscape, a description of being ("To be
without a description of to be"), the doctor becomes
identical with the experience of the scene he inhabits.
His experience is, then, of the poetry of the scene
experienced; as Stevens says in the Adagia, "Poetry is
the expression of the experience of poetry (OP 190) .
William Bevis argues that such an experience of poetry
is indeed transformational in "The Latest Freed Man."
He writes: "The epistemology behind the poem is
thoroughly experiential: what the doctor seeks and
finds is a change of consciousness, not a change of
ideas, a change of consciousness that will purge all
thought yet leave a quickened sense of being" (114) .
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Again, the "quickened sense of being" the doctor
experiences is as an observing, aware, almost non-human
(meaning-seeking) being. Transformed into an ox ("To
have the suit of the self changed to an ox") , which
Bevis says is "the perfect metaphor for [the doctor's]
newly expanded self: huge, vital, mindless, and very
much there" (114), the doctor is left to see and
understand things as they are revealed to him.
It was the importsuice of the trees outdoors.
The freshness of the oak-leaves, not so much
That they were oak-leaves, as the way they looked
(CP 205).
This is kind of perception of the "real" that
Stevens consistently writes about. It is a perception
of things in their naturally virtual, existing
condition, as they appear to the viewer, not bound by
any particular interpretation or by the objectification
of naming (the way the oak-leaves look to the doctor is
infinitely more important than that they are "oak-
leaves."), which gives the poem its meditative quality
and directs it toward a state of awareness which Bevis
calls a "hallucinatory stage of meditative
consciousness" (115), as the doctor, "At the centre of
reality, " sees "everything bulging and blazing and big
in itself" (CP 205). Ironically, the doctor has become
the "centre" of the reality surrounding him through
expiation and detachment, thereby personifying the idea
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that Stevens' construction of a poetic reality is made
most "real" in the mind of one who freely and openly
experiences the existential simplicity and
conditionality of existence.
Stevens himself applied a kind of Zen-like passive
awareness or active detachment which he experienced in
his own life to the poems he wrote, including "The
Latest Freed Man." As Bevis writes: "The word for Zen
meditation, zazen, means 'just sitting,' which was what
Stevens did, some mornings and evenings, in his room"
(116) . As Peter Brazeau writes in Parts of a World:
Wallace Stevens Remembered:
[Stevens] had a bedroom area that was furnished
up like a library and spent most of his time in
there, reading nights. He had a nice desk in
there, lamps and a sitting chair, and of course
his bed .... An oil painting of Vidal by Jean
Labasque hung in Stevens' bedroom, part of the
furnishings mentioned in the poem "The Latest
Freed Man" (116).
In the common space of his common room, filled
with common things, Stevens' doctor seeks nothing and
in doing so becomes the "centre" of all; he escapes
truth and doctrine but is enlightened by the power and
significance offered to him by the surrounding painting
and furnishings. Stevens, like the latest freed man,
experiences the poetry of his vision of the "color and
mist" of reality by simply allowing himself to exist
"in the idea of it" (CP 418).
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The reference made in the penultimate line of the
poem to Vidal, Stevens' personal art and book dealer in
France, is actually a reference to the potential of
common things and common experiences to initiate a
revision of reality. Ironically, it is Vidal, "Qui
fait fi des joliesses banales" ("who disdained everyday
pleasures"), a man of art and culture, who is chided
for not apprehending what Emerson called "the
miraculous in the common" (Bevis 115) . And as John
Dewey writes in "The Expressive Object" from Art As
Experience:
Art throws off the covers that hide the
expressiveness of experienced things; it quickens
us from the slackness of routine and enables us
to forget ourselves by finding ourselves in the
delight of experiencing the world about us in its
varied qualities and forms. It intercepts every
shade of expressiveness found in objects and
orders them in a new experience of life (104) .
Taking Dewey's remarks into consideration,
Stevens' meditations in poetry are not simply the
affective and aesthetic musings of representative
experience; they are, in effect, a call to (in)action.
As Dewey states, art as experience is an enabler, a
means by which to see and understand ourselves and our
world "in its varied qualities and forms" (104).
"Poetry is," as Stevens says in the "Adagia," "a
response to the daily necessity of getting the world
right" (OP 201) . And thus for Stevens, the world is
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forever presenting itself in its natural "rightness,"
yet as Stevens writes in "Poetry and Meaning" it is not
the aim of the poet to interpret these moments in terms
of any particular reasoned or rational meaning:
Things that have their origin in the imagination
or in the emotions (poems) very often have
meanings that differ in nature from the meanings
of things that have their origin in reason . . .
It is not possible to attach a single, rational
meaning to such things without destroying the
imaginative or emotional ambiguity or uncertainty
that is inherent in them and that is why poets do
not like to explain (OP 249) .
The poet's resistance to interpretation on the
level of strict reason directs his/her attention to a
point of meditative concentration whereby the ambiguity
of things "that have their origin in the imagination or
in the emotions" (OP 249) are explored not through
explanation but as a meaningful meditation, a
description at the end of thought. Stevens writes:
"The poet, the musician, both have explicit meanings
but they express them in the forms these take and not
in explanation" (OP 250, rny emphasis) .
Contemplation
As the second element in the process of Stevens'
"theoria, " the nature of Stevens' contemplation may be
described as a kind of discovery at the end of thought.
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In other words, for Stevens, "the poem of the act of
the mind" (CP 240) which he describes in "Of Modem
Poetry" may be within the capacity of a poet who is,
ironically, free of the imposition of thought. By
"inposition" I mean any kind of influence of reflection
which affects a change in the mind of the seer such
that things are no longer viewed in terms of how they
are seen, but rather in terms of what they immediately
signify in the meaning-making consciousness of the
observer. John Dewey has written,
All observed objects that are identified without
reflection (although their recognition may give
rise to further reflection) exhibit an integral
union of sense quality and meaning in a single
firm texture. We recognize with the eye the
green of the sea as belonging to the sea, not to
the eye, and as a quality different from the
green of a leaf; and the gray of a rock as
different in quality from that of the lichen
growing upon it. In all objects perceived for
what they are without need for reflective
inquiry, the quality is what it means, namely the
object to which it belongs (259) .
Dewey's statement seems appropriate to the nature
of Stevens' work in that for Stevens, the ontological
status of a particular image figure or idea (its
"isness"), is more often viewed as having a conditional
and relational quality of existential presence and not
as a solid, static, self-contained perspective, element
or idea of factual reality.
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Generally, the nature of Stevens' images, figures
and objects in poetry are primarily governed by a
particular quality or condition of "seeming" and not
materiality, so that the poet not only experiences the
existence of these figure and objects in terms of their
existential quality (as Dewey says, "the quality is
what it means") , but is driven by a more complex,
sensory relation to them as well, as they "Rise
liquidly in liquid lingerings / Like watery words
awash" (CP 497) before the guise of the poet. As
Stevens writes: "The more intensely one feels something
that one likes the more one is willing for it to be
what it is" (OP 200) . For Stevens, what a thing "is"
is color, sound, relation and movement as it is
understood and represented in the active imagination of
the poet.
Much more than merely existing as the thing
described, Stevens' contemplative descriptions of
"seeming" allow objects to exit a virtual condition of
quality and conditionality which gives rise to a
particularly poetical existence to Stevens' figures,
images, objects, characters and ideas. From the
meditative awareness in "The Latest Freed Man" which
promulgates the idea that freedom is "being without
description" (CP 205), Stevens' "Description without
Place" from Transport to Summer reiterates the
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possibility for the poet to exist only in descriptions
of seeming. 6 Harold Bloom has written that
"Description without Place" is a reimagining of "The
Latest Freed Man," and so by 'description' Stevens now
means redescription" (240) 7. However, more than
signifying a mere redescription of the meditations of
"The Latest Freed Man, " "Description without Place"
renders the conditions of being and reality (existence)
not in the temporizing and contextualizing world of
"flat appearance" (CP 340) but rather in the actuality
of an even more complex and elusive condition of
"seeming":
In flat appearance we should be and be.
Except for delicate clinkings not explained.
These are the actual seemings that we see,
Hear, feel and know. We feel and know them so
(CP 340).
"Description without Place" presents the
possibility that to understand the actuality of a thing
or idea ("what it is") it must be viewed as something
fundamentally governed by what Stevens calls "the
actual seemings that we see" (CP 340) . It is the
announcement of the possibility of this manner of
perception/contemplation which begins the poem:
It is possible that to seem--it is to be.
As the sun is something seeming and it is.
The sun is an example. What it seems
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It is and in such seeming all things are (CP
339) .
The nature of Stevens' contemplation, then, has
little to do with the actual processes of logical
understanding, as "seeming" is more closely related to
the inexplicable moments of clarity simple observation
may yield. In the third canto of the poem, Stevens
writes:
There might be, too, a change immense than
A poet's metaphors in which being would
Come true, a point in the fire of music where
Dazzle yields to clarity and we observe,
And observing is completing and we are content,
In a world that shrinks to an immediate whole,
That we do not need to understand, complete
Without secret arrangements of it in the mind (CP
341) .
This act of observing objects in the world
"without secret arrangements of it in the mind," is,
for Stevens, a kind of phenomenological enactment of
reality in the active seemings of reality. That is,
Stevens' manner of contemplative observation (the
manner in which the poet sees objects in reality)
becomes his understanding of the existence of reality
as a collection of things "seeming" to be. But what is
the effect of this perspective of seeming?
As Stevens writes, "seeming is description without
place" (CP 343), yet he is careful to equate this level
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of observation and contemplation to a typically
Stevensian moment of indefinable reverie, "an innate
grandiose, an innate light" (CP 342). Stevens manages
to enlarge the presence of reality manifested the poem
without having to rely on the temporalizing and
contextualizing connotations of "place,* and thus
widens the scope of the poem to what he calls "The
spirit's universe":
If seeming is description without place.
The spirit's universe, then a summer's day.
Even the seeming of a summer's day.
Is description without place. It is a sense
To which we refer experience, a knowledge
Incognito, the column in the desert.
On which the dove alights. Description is
Composed of a sight indifferent to the eye.
It is an expectation, a desire,
A palm that rises up beyond the sea,
A little different from reality:
The difference that we make in what we see
And our memorials of the difference,
Sprinklings of bright particulars from the sky
(CP 343-44).
The nature of Stevens' contemplation and
description in poetry is that it is indeed, as he
states above, a sense, a knowledge, an expectation, a
desire. For him, poetry looks forward to a future
scene, a future moment of clarity, "the just
anticipation / Of the appropriate creatures, jubilant,
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/ The forms that are attentive in thin air" (CP 344).
In the concluding section of the poem Stevens writes:
It is a world of words to the end of it.
In which nothing solid is its solid self (CP
345) .
The discovery at the end of thought which Stevens
seeks finds its expression in a description without
place, written as a text "More explicit than the
experience of sun / And moon, the book of
reconciliation, / Book of a concept only possible / In
description, canon central in itself" (CP 345). The
text which Stevens anticipates here is in itself an
anticipation of the emergence of poetry, and these are
the moments of vision, clarity and reverie which seem
to comprise the text or poem. In this respect--as a
kind of anticipation— each text or poem is given the
possibility to exist and function as a "canon central
in itself," since each contemplation/observation
corresponds to a new sense, knowledge, expectation or
desire the poet experiences. The actual act of
composing the text marks, then, an act of envisioning
and enactment of the poetry experienced in observation
and contemplation; it is a "seeming," a description
without place and an anticipation of "the total
grandeur" (CP 508) of poetry.
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Envisioning and Enactment
In the process of what I call Stevens' "theoria"
of poetry, the perceptive yet passive aspects of
meditation, observation and contemplation take shape in
a final enactment of "The outlines of being and
expressing, the syllables of its / law: / Poesis,
poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines" (CP
424). This is, of course, the experience of the
enactment of poetry itself.
In his essay "The Irrational Element of Poetry,"
Stevens cites a portion of a letter by Rimbaud in which
Rimbaud states that "It is necessary to be a seer, to
make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by
a long, immense and reasoned unruliness of the senses"
(OP 231) . Stevens also demonstrates that poetry is not
just perception but rather a kind of enactment of the
experience of perception--the poem of the act of the
mind— which aims "to create something that is so truly
and profoundly expressive of the moment that is, it is
eternal" (St. John 235). Once the poet is able to
"enact [this moment] in language, in a poem, then we
have something that can defy passage and stand against
time" (St. John 235).
For Stevens, enactments of poetry may find their
shape or order in a number of ways, but what often
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remains in Stevens is not what the poem represents as
subject, but what is suggested by the presence or
absence of figures, images, ideas, emotions, etc.,
within the poem, and how these operate to manifest the
experience of poetry within the poem. In this respect,
the content of the poem and what the poem is "about"
may be quite different. David St. John points out this
difference in his book. Where the Angels Come Toward
Us: Selected Essays, Reviews & Interviews. He writes:
Poems aren't about their content, they're about
the ways in which the perceiver— the writer, the
figure, whether or not the figure is the same as
the writer— comes into relation with whatever
experience is at stake. It's that process of
observation, reflection, and imagination that
seems to me the substance of the poem (196) .
In Stevens, this process of relational
observation, reflection and imagination is demonstrated
beautifully in "The Idea of Order at Key West." The
female singer who walks along the seashore becomes a
personified figure of the process of Stevens' poetic
"theoria," as the poem describes the woman's meditation
and contemplation as an enactment of poetry in song,
"For she was the maker of the song she sang" (CP 129) .
The poem actually begins at a moment of enactment, as
the singer's song merges with the constant cry of the
sea, and thus Stevens gives voice to both a human and
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inhuman vocalization of perspective and perception.
The poem opens with the merging of these voices:
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry
That was not ours although we understood.
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean (CP 128) .
And yet, even though "the song and water were not
medleyed sound," it is the woman's song— which plays
with and over the natural sound-surrounding of the
seashore where she locates herself— that is the poem's
most powerful enactment of imaginative perception the
audience within the poem ( "we") experiences .
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing
(CP 129).
The significance of Stevens' poetry of enactment
is that it not only places the maker, the artificer,
the singer, the poet at the center of his/her
perceptions, but that these perceptions in themselves
become the center of all perception. That is, the
perception of an individual comes to represent the
perception of a much larger, more diverse group, as
Stevens' singer is described as "the single artificer
of the world / In which she sang." The result of this
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kind of representative perspective is the creation of
an entirely new world of perception and poetry (song) :
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then
we,
As we beheld her striding there alone.
Knew that there was never a world for her
Except the one she sang, and singing, made (CP
(129-30) .
The final grandeur of Stevens' poetic process of
"theoria," from meditation to contemplation to an
enactment of the poem as a vision of a new world, seems
to rise out of a reduction of all physical reality to
the mind and voice (song) of one individual, the maker,
and the constant cry of the sea. But this reduction is
ultimately a most significant enlargement of thought
and nature converging in an expression of both human
and inhuman sound. Thus, the enactment of song in "The
Idea of Order at Key West" is at once a reduction but
then it is also a supreme example of creation, not just
of the song, but of the self and the natural
surrounding scene:
And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then
we,
As we beheld her striding there alone.
Knew that there never was a world for her
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Except the one she sang and, singing, made (CP
(129-30) .
What Stevens' singer achieves is a convergence of
all things into song, and thus the female artificer
makes a song, a self, a world that never existed before
her act of articulation. What the singer accomplishes
here seems to coincide with Stevens' own vision of the
function of poetry to enact thought and experience into
a new relation, a new space, a new vision of self and
world in order "to create something that is so truly
and profoundly expressive of the moment that is, it is
eternal" (St. John 235). Once the poet is able to
"enact that in language, in a poem, then we have
something that can defy passage and stand against time"
(St. John 235) . And thus, the poet becomes in the
highest sense "The unnamed creator of an unknown
sphere, / Unknown as yet, unknowable" (OP 127) . For
Stevens, the mind of the poet not only presents but
renews the world. He writes in "The Sail of Ulysses" :
“The mind renews the world in a verse / A passage of
music, a paragraph / By a right philosopher: renews /
And possesses by sincere insight / In the John-begat-
Jacob of what we know, / The flights through space,
changing habitudes" (OP 129).
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Notes
1. Steiner writes: The word 'theory' has lost its
birthright. At the source, it draws on meanings and
connotations both secular and ritual. It tells of
concentrated insight, of an act of contemplation
focused patiently on its object. . .A 'theorist' or
'theoretician' is one who is disciplined in observance,
a term itself charged with a twofold significance of
intellectual-sensory perception and religious or ritual
conduct. . .Thus, theory is inhabited by truth when it
contemplates its objects unwaveringly and when, in the
observant process of such contemplation, it beholds, it
takes grasp of the often confused and contingent
('vulgar') images, associations, suggestions, possibly
erroneous, to which the object gives rise. It is only
in the latter half of the sixteenth century that
'theory' and the 'theoretical' take on their modem
guise. And it is not before the 1640's, it would seem,
that a 'theorist' is one who devised and entertains
speculative hypotheses.
2. By the expression "poetic force" I mean that
initial calling of poetry which the poet experiences
before the writing of the poem. In a later chapter I
explore this influence in Stevens as the force of
"nobility," an outgrowth of Plato's concept of "the
prime origin" in the Phaedrus and Allen Grossman's
vision of the "calling" of poetry.
3. I use the term "enactment" much in the same way
Allen Grossman speaks of an act of creation in The
Sighted Singer as "not an act (in the sense in which an
act is a terminal moment) but a process in the sense
that it is always ongoing and only ongoing" (214).
Grossman goes on to say that this kind of act of
creation is generated in both writer and reader. He
writes:
The process of creation of human presence through
acknowledgment moves through persons across time
and is completed neither in the writer nor in the
reader but in the mutually honorable reciprocity
of both. At any moment of the reading the reader
is the author of the poem, and the poem is the
author of the reader. The honor of creation is
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not with one or the other, but among them. Above
all, they are intended (destined) for one another
in that the poem looks ahead to the reader, and
the reader (as reader) to the poem (214) .
Two of the best recent descriptions of the poetry of
enactment may be located in David St. John's Where the
Angels Come Toward Us: Selected Essays, Reviews &
Interviews and Allen Grossman's "The Calling of Poetry:
The Constitution of Poetic Vocation, the Recognition of
the Maker in the Twentieth Century, and the Work of the
Poet in Our Time. "
4. I believe the word "testimonial" best describes the
general critical position of poets' writings on
Stevens, since the word contextualizes the various ways
in which Stevens is interpreted by these writers.
Testimonial suggests (1) a lasting evidence or reminder
of something or someone notable; (2) an expression of
great approval or high esteem; (3) something that
serves as tangible verification.
5. In fact, just four years after his review of
Untermeyer's The New Era in American Poetry, Aiken
wrote "A Basis of Criticism, " in which he argues
against an aesthetic-based approach to literature. He
states: "Its difficulty has of course been precisely
its uncertainty as to what it is that is 'beautiful.'
'Beauty, ' the concept of hypothesis on which the whole
structure of aesthetic criticism rests, invoked on
every page, in every paragraph, implicit in every
judgment, remains, despite our idolatry, singularly
shadowy" (A Reviewer's ABC 55) .
6. Stevens wrote the following in a letter: "It seems
to me an interesting idea: that is to say, the idea
that we live in the description of a place and not in
the place itself, and in every vital sense we do"
(Letters 494).
7. What I am attempting to describe here is Stevens'
view of sensory perception as an internalization.
Stevens writes in Opus Posthumous:
According to the views of sensory perception, we
do not see the world immediately but only as the
result of a process of seeing and after the
completion of that process, that is to say, we
never see the world except the moment after.
Thus we are constantly observing the past. Here
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is an idea, not the result of poetic thinking and
entirely without poetic intention, which
constantly changes the face of the world. Its
effect is that of an almost inappreciable change
of which nevertheless, we remain acutely
conscious. The material world, for all the
assurances of the eye, has become immaterial. It
has become an image of the mind. The solid earth
disappears and the whole atmosphere is subtilized
not by the arrival of some venerable beam of
light from an almost hypothetical star, but by a
breach of reality. What we see is not an
external world but an image of it and hence an
internal world (OP 190-91) .
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Works Cited
Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Various
Cities, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1988
Aiken, Conrad. "The Ivory Tower I." The New Republic
19 (May 10, 1919), 58-60.
A Reviewer's ABC. Collected Criticism
of Conrad Aiken From 1916 to the Present. New
York: Meridian Books, Inc., 1958.
Bevis, William W. Mind of Winter: Wallace Stevens,
Meditation, and Literature. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988.
Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our
Climate. Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 1977.
Brown, Merle. Wallace Stevens: The Poem as Act.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970.
Cavell, Stanley. The Senses of Walden. San Francisco:
North Point Press, 1981.
Dewey, John. Art As Experience. New York: Capricorn
Books, Inc., 1958.
Doyle, Charles, Ed. Wallace Stevens: The Critical
Heritage. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1985.
Eliot, T.S. "On Poetry and Criticism." On Poetry and
Poets. New York: Noonday Press, 1957.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Works of Ralph Waldo
Emerson: His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and
Orations. London: George Bell and Sons, 1881.
Gelpi, Albert. A Coherent Splendor: The American
Poetic Renaissance, 1910— 1950. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Grossman, Allen. "The Calling of Poetry: The
Constitution of Poetic Vocation, the Recognition
of the Maker in the Twentieth Century, and the
Work of the Poet in Our Time." TriQuarterly 79
(Fall, 1990): 220-238.
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Grossman, Allen with Mark Halliday. The sighted
singer: two works on poetry for readers and
writers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1992.
Jarrell, Randall. The Third Book of Criticism. New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965.
Poetry and the Age. New York:
Octagon Books, 1972.
Kazin, Alfred. Writing Was Everything. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1995.
Kermode, Frank. Wallace Stevens. New York: Chip's
Bookshop, Inc., 1960.
Leggett, B.J. Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory.
Chapel Hill and London: University of North
Carolina Press, 1987.
McDermott, John J. Streams of Experiences: Reflections
on the History and Philosophy of American Culture.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.
Martin, Jay. Conrad Aiken: The Life of His Art.
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1962.
Poulet, Georges. "Criticism and the Experience of
Inferiority." The Language of Criticism and the
Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy.
Edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato.
Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1970.
Pratt, William. "Jarrell as Critic." Mississippi
Quarterly, volume 34, number 4, 1981.
Riddel, Joseph N- The Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and
Poetics of Wallace Stevens. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1965.
Schaum, Melita. Wallace Stevens and the Critical
Schools. Tuscaloosa and London: University of
Alabama Press, 1988.
-----------------., ed. Wallace Stevens and the
Feminine. Tuscaloosa and London: University of
Alabama Press, 1993.
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St. John, David. Where the Angels Come Toward Us:
Selected Essays, Reviews & Interviews. New York:
White Pine Press, 1995.
Steiner, George. Real Presences. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace
Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.
Letters of Wallace Stevens.
Selected and Edited by Holly Stevens. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1966.
The Necessary Angel . * Essays on
Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage
Books, 1951.
Opus Posthumous. New York: Vintage
Books, 1990.
Untermeyer, Louis. "The Ivory Tower II." The New
Republic. 19 (May 10, 1919), 60-61.
Vendler, Helen. Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modem
American Poets. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1980.
The Music of What Happens: Poems,
Poets, Critics. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1988.
Zukofsky, Louis. Prepositions: The Collected Critical
Essays of Louis Zukofsky. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1981.
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It is the belief and not the god that counts
Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous
We have to step boldly into man's interior world or not
at all.
Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous
The things that we build or grow or do are so little
when compared to the things that we suggest or believe
or desire.
Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens
CHAPTER TWO:
"MERELY IN LIVING AS AND WHERE WE LIVE" :
WALLACE STEVENS AND THE INTERIORIZATION OF BELIEF
Throughout the entire body of Stevens' work, the
idea of the importance of poetry is a central concern.
In a letter to Ronald Lane Latimer, Wallace Stevens
writes: "I think that the real trouble with poetry is
that poets have no conception of the importance of the
thing. Life without poetry is, in effect, life without
a sanction" (Letters 299). Indeed, as the first
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epigraph suggests, for Stevens poetry is a matter of
belief. By belief X do not mean merely to suggest that
Stevens' work specifically addresses issues of
theological or religious faith, although as David
Jarraway maintains, "Belief, in the theological or
religious sense, has always been, and no doubt will
continue to be, a favorite crux in any complete reading
of Wallace Stevens' poetry" (1) . Perhaps a more
compelling, more complete reading of Stevens' work as
belief is to refigure the questions of theological or
religious faith which fascinated him, and view them--
along with all of Stevens' poetic images and ideas— in
light of their significance to Stevens' mission in
poetry to find a certain kind of satisfaction and
pleasure. It is this pleasure— hedonistic and
spiritual at the same time— that provides Stevens the
necessary "sanction" which transforms life into an act
of imagination. In short, for Stevens poetry, as an
act of imagination and faith, takes the place of
religion. He states in a letter to Hi Simons:
It is a habit with me to be thinking of some
substitute for religion .... My trouble, and
the trouble of a great many people, is the loss
of belief in the sort of God in whom we were all
brought up to believe (Letters 348) .
For Stevens, the loss of belief in the "God in
whom we were all brought up to believe" signifies a
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loss of the imagination of faith, that basis of a
believer's fundamental connection to the visible and
invisible images of faith, the ritual and repetition of
sacred doctrine and liturgy, and the promise of
purification and redemption religion offers to its
believers. The nothingness which this loss of faith
seems to signify, according to J. Hillis Miller in his
important essay, "Wallace Stevens' Poetry of Being,"
the basis of all Stevens' thought and poetry" (144) and
"coincides with a radical transformation in the way man
sees the world. Stevens writes:
To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve
like clouds is one of the great human
experiences. It is not as if they had gone over
the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if
they had been overcome by other gods of greater
power and profounder knowledge. It is simply
that they came to nothing .... What was most
extraordinary is that they left no mementos
behind, no thrones, no mystic rings, no texts
either of the soil or of the soul. It was as if
they had never inhabited the earth (OP 206-207) .
What Stevens describes here is indeed a radical
transformation from a belief in the ideas and images of
religion— gods of power— to the anticipation of poetry,
as Stevens simultaneously poeticizes the gods (albeit
recognizing their dissolution into nothingness) and
tacitly announces his mission, as poet, to leave his
own mementos behind, his own texts of soil and soul,
and to demonstrate that he, if the gods had not,
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certainly inhabited the earth and connected his work to
a human community of followers/readers. For Stevens,
poetry replaces religion in such a way that it allows
him to seek to understand what was his favorite poetic
relationship between the visible and invisible, how
this relationship is represented in the ritual and
repetition of language (the word, the doctrine) and how
this language of representation offers its maker, the
poet, sanctifying pleasure in life. This refiguration
of the loss of the imagination of faith is rendered in
a poetry which, as the three sections of "Notes Toward
a Supreme Fiction" prescribe, must be abstract, must
change, and must give pleasure; however, it also must
be human, that is, concerned with the "soil and soul,
the foundation and spirit of human awareness. " In an
often-quoted statement made in the essay "Imagination
as Value, " Stevens states his earthly purpose in
poetry: "... the great poems of heaven and hell have
been written and the great poem of the earth remains to
be written" [NA 142).
And yet, Stevens also directly states in
"Imagination as Value" that "Poetry does not address
itself to beliefs" (NA 144) . What he suggests here is
that poetry not pursue or project an absolute image or
idea of faith (the infallible image of God, the
Biblical proclamations of the Church as doctrine, the
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Word) , but rather something the poet creates which is
synonymous with his/her particular idea or image of a
transcendental force or influence in reality. Stevens
writes in another essay, "The Irrational Element in
Poetry":
While it can lie in the temperament of very few
of us to write poetry in order to find God, it is
probably the purpose of each of us to write
poetry to find the good which, in the Platonic
sense, is synonymous with God (OP 228) .
Stevens' connection to the religious or the
theological is made through an interiorized catechizing
of the poetic imagination and an investigation into how
this "internal scene" discloses the reality in poetry
(or, perhaps, the reality of poetry) which the poet may
enact as "the good, in the Platonic sense, which is
synonymous with God" and not as something peripheral,
marginal or secondary to that disclosure. And while
that individualized found good is characterized as
Platonic or ideal (static), Stevens' statement is a
demonstration of his belief in the ability of every
poet (seer, thinker, philosopher, maker, artist,
artificer) to uncover, at least, the images, ideas,
moments of experience necessary to sustain the artist's
faith in that which he/she creates. For Stevens, the
poet's religion (system of belief) is poetry, the
painter's religion is painting, and so on.
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In Stevens, the idea of belief is equated to the
life of the idea itself, in the imagination of the seer
(poet) , and how the object, the image, the perception,
the impression or the thought manifests that idea in
poetic space. As he simply states in "Adagia," "I
believe in the image" (OP 192). The ultimate
expression of this manifestation in poetry is what
Stevens refers to as the "satisfaction of belief," the
integration of what the poet sees (the object
perceived) and interprets (the object reimagined) into
a single thing. In short, the seer and the thing seen
become one. Stevens appropriately writes of this
process using "poetic" rather than apodictic logic.
For example, he states:
Proposita:
1. God and the imagination are one.
2. The thing imagined is the imaginer.
The second equals the thing imagined and the
imaginer are one. Hence, I suppose, the imaginer
is God (OP 202).
Stevens' "Proposita" (proposition of poetry) is
more a statement having to do with a belief in the life
and existence of poetry in the mind and imagination of
the poet than a philosophical or theoretical truth-
statement. The concluding sentence is evidence of
typical Stevensian poetic logic, as "Hence" gives the
line a philosophical or didactic (even pedantic) tone,
as the beginning of a conclusive truth statement, while
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"I suppose" directly undercuts any claim of certainty
the sentence might assert. Given the manner in which
"Hence, * and "I suppose ..." effectively negate one
another, the reader is left to ponder what is Stevens'
first idea— that God and the imagination are one.
From The Rock, Stevens' final book of poetry,
perhaps the most beautifully moving and appropriate
example of Stevens' "Proposita" of poetic oneness and
interiorization of belief. 1 The title of "The Final
Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour, " as Harold Bloom
has noted, "may imply not that the muse is about to
perish but that poet and muse are about to be joined
that every remaining poem will be a dialogue of one"
(Wallace Stevens: The Poems of our Climate 359).
Ironically, the final soliloquy of the interior
paramour signifies not the finality of inferiority but
the beginning’ of the poet's awareness of it as "a
light, a power, the miraculous influence" (CP 524) .
The oneness achieved out of the joining of the interior
paramour and poet does not signify a permanent point of
stasis or finality to the relationship, even though the
title offers such a teleological analysis. Barbara
Fisher, in viewing the poem as "the culmination of a
cosmic project" (92), has made such a teleological
reading. She writes: "But the luminousness that
pervades the dusk, the warmth and power that flood the
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couple collected into one thing, tell us that this is
no way station but the end of the journey" (93) . And
while she is correct to state in her next sentence that
"The path of the obscure has lead somehow to order,
wholeness, knowledge" (93), the poem, like the vast
majority of Stevens' work, does not resolve itself so
simply as "the end of the journey" (93).
The poet's awareness, understanding, and
experience of a moment of light are not moments of
finality in Stevens, just as the satisfactions of
belief which these moments inspire do not always
represent the signification of final beliefs or final
truths. Stevens often searches for finality (final
truths, final beliefs) but realizes, like the force of
"nobility" he speaks of in "The Noble Rider and the
Sound of Words," to fix or define the image, the light,
the force of feeling that makes the poem a powerful and
protean representation of belief, is to invalidate
"that which arranged the rendezvous" (CP 524) and thus
falsify the poem through the process of interpretive
objectification. 2 For Stevens, it is not definition
but the discovery of the force or power of poetry
within the poem, "that which arranged the rendezvous,"
which guides the poet, the artist, toward an
understanding of the voice of the interior paramour.
In "The Relations between Poetry and Painting" Stevens
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writes: "The greatest truth we could hope to discover,
in whatever field we discovered it, is that man's truth
is the final resolution of everything" (NA 175, my
emphasis).
As an interior portrait of the muse and poet, "The
Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour" may be
interpreted as a "cosmic project" (universal or
global) , however it is more specifically a cosmic
project which hopes to discover that man's truth, as a
shared realization, is the final resolution of
everything. Stevens writes:
Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.
This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor a
warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.
Here, now we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
Within its vital boundary , in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one . . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air.
In which being there together is enough
(CP 524).
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This is perhaps one of Stevens' most profound
poems of inferiority and satisfaction, as it describes
the epiphany of the mystic, the breakthrough which
eliminates all distinctions between an interior and
exterior state of both physical and mental
conditionality. Looking at the poem in terms of its
relinquishment of exteriority (exterior objects) and
boundary-making, to a point of shared stillness, light
and being, Stevens' poem becomes, in George's Poulet's
words, a "purely mental entity" (58) . It is
particularly interesting that this is a shared
experience ("We make a dwelling in the evening air,/In
which being there together is enough."), since the
poem's title suggests that we read it as a true
soliloquy, the inner speech of one particular person.
However, for Stevens, the final soliloquy is not the
language of one person, one mind, but the collection of
two minds, "the central mind," together experiencing a
moment of (ontological as well as poetic) satisfaction.
Satisfaction is achieved in the poem through
Stevens' poetic elimination of the difference between
exteriority to inferiority. Every stanza, with the
exception of the final two, contains some reference to
an exteriorizing or limiting boundary-making force.
The poem begins with the two (lovers, poet and muse?)
minds on the one hand bound to the confines of a room
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(itself an interior space) , but on the other hand
engaged in the thought that "the world imagined is the
ultimate good." It is the presence and pressure of the
collected mind over the physical boundary that the room
creates which frees the couple (lovers, poet and muse?)
by allowing them the power to initiate a refiguration
of that physical space. As the poem progresses, the
physical world becomes diminished while the "purely
mental entities" (Poulet 58) of an interior existence
takes its place. Stanzas two and three also refer to a
boundary-making image, the "single shawl / Wrapped
tightly round us," however the poem at this point
already presents the possibility of a new boundary, the
limitless boundary of the mind. The "obscurity of an
order, a whole, / A knowledge" that Stevens mentions in
stanza four is a cry to replace the initial boundaries
of the poem's physicality with a new "vital boundary,
in the mind." It is at this point that the poem fully
relinquishes its previous connection to the influence
of exteriority and thus changes the nature of its
direction to an interior or "inner" position. The poem
now "yields itself with little resistance to the
importunities of the mind" (Poulet 58). From this
profoundly interior position, where all objects of
physical reality have been transformed by the freedom
of the imagination, Stevens can continue, in the
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penultimate and final stanzas, with perhaps his most
resonant and profound statement of poetic freedom and
satisfaction, as he writes "We say God and the
imagination are one . . . . "
The final two stanzas complete the movement of the
poem into interiority; there is nothing in these
stanzas which have any connection at all to any
significant physical image or idea. In short, the
world of the two beings of the poem have not simply
been reduced to the size of a room but rather have been
infinitely expanded by the possibilities of the mind.
The confines of the room have been replaced with a new
space whereby the center has become the circumference
of a surrounding:
Out of this same light, out of the central mind.
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough (CP 524) .
The ineffable nature of this new space, as
imagination, light and air, suggest that this is not a
place of finality but rather a place of movement and
subtlety, and it is here, within the poetry of the
poem, in that space which is always presenting and
perfecting itself, where Stevens places his faith. For
him, new, changing engagements with "the miraculous
influence" are similar to the Catholic visiting the
confessional every week— the act operates as a means of
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sanctifying redemption, satisfaction, and a hope for
new vision.
For Stevens, the poet must deal with metamorphosis
as the only constant in experience. That is, the poet
must catch reality on the fly through an act of
attention to the subtleties, the variances, the
glimpses, the angles of perception, that which is
becoming made, the possible, the notes and not the
text, the syllable and not the word, the sound and not
the utterance, the invisible, the absences and gaps of
thought, beaches where "things certain, sustaining us
in certainty" (the physical reality of the land) merge
with the uncertainty, flex, flow, fecundity, movement
of the sea, the veiled bride, the introspective
voyager, "the deflations of distance, the changing of
light, the dropping of silence, the solitude of night"
(CP 62). All these conditional or relational objects
and images Stevens often "seizes" as what he has called
"the First Idea" or "pretexts of poetry." It is from
their spontaneous origination in the imagination of the
poet (seer) that the poetry itself may become made, and
it is this moment of realization, which is actually
more of an awareness of the veiled subtlety of reality,
to which Stevens seems always to be receptive.
The notion of "the First Idea" is critical in
Stevens, as it signifies much more than merely the
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beginning of something (the poem, the text) , which is,
at the same time, the signification of an anticipated
end. For Stevens, the First Idea is connected to the
poet's ability to find the satisfactions of belief in
poetry needed to sustain his interior existence as
something pure and powerful. It signifies the
stripping away of a static or stable externality
(things in the world, things as they are) and "Notes
Toward a Supreme Fiction" is, on one level, about the
transformative power of this influence. In the third
canto of the first section of the poem, "It Must Be
Abstract," Stevens writes:
The poem refreshes life so that we share.
For a moment, the first idea ... It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will.
To an immaculate end. We move between these
points:
From that ever-early candor to its late plural
And the candor of them is the strong exhilaration
Of what we feel from what we think, of thought
Beating in the heart, as if blood newly came,
An elixir, an excitation, a pure power.
The poem, through candor, brings back a power
again
That gives a candid kind to everything (CP 382) .
Stevens initially establishes the binary points of
influence from which the First Idea begins and ends (an
immaculate beginning and an immaculate end) rather than
defining the First Idea itself. He does this in order
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to describe what lies between these points— as in "The
Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour, " a certain
movement and progression of shared thought, what
Stevens calls the "certain characteristics of a supreme
fiction" (Letters 435) . In a letter to Hi Simons,
Stevens writes: "In principle there appear to be
certain characteristics of a supreme fiction and the
NOTES is confined to a statement of a few of those
characteristics" (Letters 435). It is what lies
between, within, and inside the boundaries of beginning
and end that matters most and that reveal those
characteristics of a supreme fiction. Yet, Stevens'
working inside, or between, the boundaries of beginning
and end makes "Notes, " as Harold Bloom has observed in
Wallace Stevens: The Poems of our Climate, "a
notoriously elusive text to write commentaries upon"
(158), since Stevens "gave us a canon of poems
themselves more advanced as interpretation than as yet
our criticism has gotten to be" (author's emphasis,
167) . Stevens himself wrote of the poem: "As I see the
subject, it could occupy a school of rabbis for the
next few generations" (Letters 435). The poem, which
arises out of the First Idea, moves between (and
contains) both beginning and end, abstract and real,
and serves as the promise of fulfilling our human
potential to share, if but for only a moment, the
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light, the kindness, the sincerity and openness of
heart "That gives a candid kind to everything" (CP
382) . In this respect, at least in the beginning of
the poem, Stevens shows us that he is indeed a believer
with a faith , and his faith is in the power of poetry
to bring about a shared change in life, a refreshening
of life that the elixir, excitation and pure power of
the First Idea can bring to the poet (and reader) as
belief, satisfaction and pleasure.
It is my contention that what Stevens seeks in the
poem, as its maker, is a position of inferiority
established in order for him to approach the poetry of
a particular subject— "the willing suspension of
disbelief," or in William James' famous words, "the
will to believe." In a often quoted letter to Henry
Church, Stevens states his poem's purpose:
There are things with respect to which we
willingly suspend disbelief; if there is
instinctive in us a will to believe, or if there
is a will to believe, whether or not it is
instinctive, it seems to me that we can suspend
disbelief with reference to a fiction as easily
as we can suspend it with reference to anything
else....I have no idea of the form that a supreme
fiction would take. The Notes start out with the
idea that it would take any form: that it would
be abstract. Of course, in the long run, poetry
would be the supreme fiction; the essence of
poetry is change and the essence of change is
that it must give pleasure (Letters 430) .
Making a distinction between Stevens talking about
his poem and within his poem, Bloom's reasoning for
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quoting the passage above is to show that "Stevens'
purpose in the poem's text, like Whitman's, is to
define himself, not poetry" (175) . Bloom writes: "We
will find Stevens, at the climax of "It Must Give
Pleasure," so experiencing a sense of his own fictive
power as to achieve a pragmatically efficacious joy"
(175-6). It is not until the eighth canto of It Must
Give Pleasure, the final section of the poem, that
Stevens boldly asks the question: "What am I to
believe?" (CP 404), yet he asks this not "to move to a
climax with egotistical sublime" (Bloom The Breaking of
the Vessels, 8) but as an attempt to satisfy his mind
in its search for that something (force or feeling)
which will suffice.
Every Stevens poem, even in what may be his most
self-defining piece, "As You Leave the Room," written
late in his career and in which he asks the question of
himself, "I wonder, have I lived a skeleton's life, /
As a disbeliever in reality, / A countryman of all the
bones in the world?" (OP 117), Stevens' presence in his
poetry is not just to define himself but to question
and seek out a finer understanding of the workings of
a larger mind, imagination and belief in poetry.
Inherent to self-definition, if one accepts this as
Stevens' aim in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," is a
solution or answer to one's self identity; however, in
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Stevens there are many questions asked, regarding being,
belief and perception and very few answers provided to
them. At the beginning of "As You Leave the Room, "
Stevens reassures himself of his past capacity to ask
these things of himself, and in the act of asking he
discovers that his pursuits were not simply skeletal or
without the heartfelt emotion and passion of humanistic
connection:
You speak. You say: Today's character is not
A skeleton out of its cabinet. Nor am I.
The poem about the pineapple, the one
About the mind as never satisfied,
The one about the credible hero, the one
About summer, are not what skeletons think about
(CP 116-17) .
What seems to be central to the asking of these
questions is not how they signify Stevens' attempt to
define himself, but rather how he attempts to define a
more universal, interiorized mode of thought and
experience. The idea of "the central mind" that
Stevens speaks of in "The Final Soliloquy of the
Interior Paramour" is not simply Stevens' own mind, but
the mind of a collective imagination. Moreover, the
interiorized stance Stevens maintains in his poetry
allows the poetry, and not himself, to be the center,
the "clairvoyant eye" so that what is experienced is
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the poetry of the poem and not simply a self-defining
static depiction of reality as "things as they are."
It is from this profoundly interiorized position
that Stevens creates his green, fluent mundo (CP 407),
his belief in poetry as a necessary sanction of life.
Stevens found it necessary to engage a more protean,
interior, imaginative basis of belief than what was
offered to him by the tenets of conventional religious
belief in which he was raised. As Steven's states in
an address to the Poetry Society of America in 1951:
"Individual poets, whatever their imperfections
may be, are driven all their lives by that inner
companion of the conscience which is, after all,
the genius of poetry in their hearts and minds.
I speak of a companion of the conscience because
to every faithful poet the faithful poem is an
act of conscience (OP 252).
But what is meant by interiorization? How are the
acts of interiorization in Stevens acts of belief? Do
these explored interior places for poetry lead Stevens
to the kind of satisfaction(s) he seeks through poetry,
as a kind of sanction in and of life?
As Stevens suggests in his statement to the Poetry
Society of America, poets are driven by an "inner
companion." It is important to note that this
companion is a companion of conscience, an inner voice
or sense of right and wrong, duty and moral governing
the poet's sense of duty interiorization seems to be
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something more than the concealing, hiding or
distancing of the poet maintains from the poem, as to
completely accomplish this kind of spacing would be an
inpossibility. Interiorization in Stevens is a
combination of abstraction and what I call
"psychotextual merging." 3 Contrary to the connotations
of abstraction, which suggest a meaning of vagueness,
absentmindedness or befuddlement, abstraction for
Stevens signifies an act of reseeing or reimaging the
world in terms of what is often not seen, considered,
or interpreted as vital to one's lived experience. For
Stevens, the world (our typical view of reality as
objects in space) must be abstracted in order for the
artist to see things with, as he says in "Credences of
Siammer," "the hottest fire of sight" (CP 373); it is to
have the awareness that "reality changes from substance
to subtlety" (NA 174). It is from this point of view
of subtlety that Stevens calls for a new scene to be
explored and thus, a new subject for poetry.
Stevens writes in his essay "The Noble Rider and
the Sound of Words":
The subject matter of poetry is not that
'collection of solid, static objects extended in
space' but the life that is lived in the scene
that it composes; and so reality is not that
external scene but the life that is lived in it.
(NA 25).
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For Stevens, the life that is lived in the scene
that reality composes is a indeed a life of the mind
and imagination of the poet but also one that may deny
the poet the ability to represent the "external scene"
in the poem itself. Trying to arrive at a Stevensian
kind of "thing itself, " a complete form or figure of a
literary work which represents that "lived scene" which
Stevens speaks of, Georges Poulet, in "Criticism and
the Experience of Inferiority" asks at the conclusion
of his essay, "What is this subject left standing in
isolation after every examination of a literary work?"
(72) . He answers himself by posing a few more
questions and by making a final critical comment. He
writes:
Is it the individual genius of the artist,
visibly present in his work, yet having an
invisible life independent of the work? Or is
it, as Valery thinks, an anonymous and abstract
consciousness presiding, in its aloofness, over
the operation of all more concrete consciousness?
Whatever it may be, I am constrained to
acknowledge that all subjective activity present
in a literary work is not entirely explained by
its relationship with forms and objects within
the work. There is in the work a mental activity
profoundly engaged in objective forms; and there
is, at another level, forsaking all forms, a
subject which reveals itself to itself ... in
its transcendence relative to all which is
reflected in it. At this point, no object can
any longer express it; no structure can any
longer define it; it is exposed in its
ineffability and in its fundamental indeterminacy
(72) .
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What Poulet identifies here as the work's
quality of transcendence, its ineffable and
indefinable character and self-revealing subject,
supports Harold Bloom's notion that some forms of
art (including Stevens' work) are more advanced as
interpretation than as yet our criticism has gotten
to be" (author's emphasis 167). Since the critical
act is essentially governed by a desire for some
form of interpretative determinacy--whether it be
articulated in the language of political,
philosophical, historical, social, sexual,
linguistic, or gender-specific ideology— Stevens'
seems to direct critics to ponder his poetry without
a desire for determinacy, without a specific
ideology and consider view it "in its ineffability
and fundamental indeterminacy" (Poulet 72) .
The bewildered reader of Stevens is, then, lead
by Stevens to ask: What would be left standing in
isolation after the final examination of this
literary work? Perhaps what might remain is this
quote from Poulet, which is not a specific
examination of Stevens but may nevertheless serve as
an accurate critical characterization of the nature
of Stevens' work and the various concerns it
presents to the reader. Stevens' genius is indeed
"visibly present in the work, yet [has] an invisible
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life independent of the work." And, following
Valery, Stevens does leave us with "an anonymous and
abstract consciousness presiding, in its aloofness,
over the operation of all the more concrete
consciousness." Poulet presents his reader with two
possibilities of the final subject of a literary
work and Stevens' work seems to fulfill both
possibilities. Moreover, Poulet's comment that
there exists a level of mental activity wherein the
"subject reveals itself to itself in its
transcendence relative to all that is reflected in
it" is also seems to be true of Stevens' interior
poetics of abstraction. The ineffability and
fundamental indeterminacy within Stevens' work seems
to manifest itself in a willing interference of mind
and external (static, truth-based) objects; this
interference results in a kind of created
abstraction which causes the poet to be "bound hand
and foot ... to the omnipotence of fiction"
(Poulet 58). According to Poulet,
it is the privilege of exterior objects to
dispense with any interference from the mind.
All they ask is to be left alone .... But the
same is surely not true of interior objects. By
definition they are condemned to change their
very nature, condemned to lose their materiality.
They become images, ideas, words, that is to say
purely mental entities. In sum, in order to
exist as mental objects they must relinquish
their existence as real objects. On the one
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hand, this is cause for regret. As soon as I
replace my direct perception of reality by the
words of a book, I deliver myself, bound hand and
foot, to the omnipotence of fiction. I say
farewell to what is, in order to feign belief in
what is not. I surround myself with fictitious
beings; I become the prey of language. There is
no escaping this takeover. Language surrounds me
with its unreality. On the other hand, the
transmutation through language of reality into a
fictional equivalent, has undeniable advantages.
The universe of fiction is infinitely more
elastic than the world of objective reality. It
lends itself to any use: it yields with little
resistance to the importunities of the mind.
Moreover--and of all its benefits I find this one
the most appealing— this interior universe
constituted by language does not seem radically
opposed to the me who thinks it (58).
The importunities of Stevens' mind in poetry is
always present, so that the materiality that
exteriority brings to the poem is remade (made new) and
interiorized in the imagination. It is a yielding to a
language that, as Poulet states, "surrounds [the
writer] with unreality" (58) and allows him to freely
experience "this interior universe" (58) in the terms
and conditions of its unreality. In this respect, the
figure of the poet, in his/her creations of
abstraction, becomes as complex as the universe which
is created.
In "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,"
Stevens, in his attempt "to construct the figure of a
poet, a possible poet," (NA 23) writes:
[The poet's] own measure as a poet, in spite of
all the passions of all the lovers of truth, is
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the measure of his power to abstract himself, and
to withdraw with him into his abstraction the
reality on which the lovers of truth insist. He
must be able to abstract himself and also to
abstract reality, which he does by placing it in
his imagination (NA 23) .
For Stevens, the poem, as well as the poet, must
be abstracted in order to achieve a new poetic content.
Charles Altieri, in his essay, "Why Stevens Must Be
Abstract, or What a Poet Can Learn from Painting, " has
argued that Stevens attributes four principles to the
powers of abstraction in poetry: (1) abstraction is a
means for poetry to make disclosures about the world;
(2) abstraction is a contrary to truth because its
force is as a process rather than a statement; (3)
abstraction as process has claims both to be and to
account for reality; and (4) exercises in abstraction
enable us to display our selves, our human powers, and
human relations to an environment with an intensity
that warrants our claiming a nobility for ourselves
(334).2
Abstraction is a particular means for poetry to
make disclosures about the world. It is the act of
effectively viewing the world of reality through the
imagination, something Stevens consistently speaks of
throughout his career, which allows the seer to
disclose, not define, the world through poetry* In
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his "Introduction" to The Necessary Angel: Essays on
Reality and the Imagination, Stevens writes:
Ordinarily [the poet] will disclose what he finds
in his own poetry by way of the poetry itself.
He exercises this function most often without
being conscious of it, so that the disclosures in
his poetry, while they define what seems to him
to be poetry, are disclosures of poetry, not
disclosures of definitions of poetry (vii).
Signifying an act of uncovering or a laying open,
Stevens' poetry discloses the world by means of a
process of acknowledged discovery, and thus does not
fix determining limits on the nature, value or meaning
of its own projections. In this respect, disclosure is
antithetical to definition, which aims to set a limit
or boundary to something (an idea, an image, an
interpretation) for the purpose of exact description.
Stevens' disclosures, because they are made through the
investigation of relations ("as" or "seem"), never
really achieve the fixed or finalized presence of a
defining "is," but an "is" that resists definition, for
example, sound, color or force of feeling. And
although Stevens often appears to be working on the
level of definition (not ideas about the thing but the
thing itself), poems such as "Sea Surface Full of
Clouds, " "The Pleasures of Merely Circulating, " "Poem
Written at Morning, * An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, "
and "The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"
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often lose their connection to a definable material
presence and become expressions of transmutation— from
fact to feeling, from visible to invisible, from
presence to absence, from audible to inaudible.
If one accepts the idea that Stevens' poetry
generally signifies a movement (an integration, a
transmutation) of some kind, the "illumination of a
surface, the movement of a self in the rock" (OP 257),
then Altieri's argument that Stevens' abstractions are
adverse to truth because their force is as a process
and not as a statement is valid. In almost all of
Stevens' "definitions" of poetry, some type of movement
is emphasized, and thus "definition" becomes poetic a
description of process, analogy or metaphor: "Poetry
is a search for the inexplicable" (OP 198); "Poetry is
a pheasant disappearing in the brush" (OP 198); "Every
poem is a poem within a poem: the poem of the idea
within the poem of the words" (OP 199); "Poetry is a
means of redemption (OP 186) ; A poem is a meteor" (OP
185); Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of
getting the world right" (OP 201); "Poetry constantly
requires a new relation" (OP 202). These descriptions
of poetry essentially disclose moments and movements of
poetry in every aspect of life. As Stevens writes:
"The poet feels abundantly the poetry of everything"
(OP 190).
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Altieri's' final point on abstraction is that it
enables the artist to reveal himself/herself to the
environment with such intensity that it warrants our
claiming a nobility for ourselves. Stevens seems to
"claim" a nobility not for himself but for the world of
artistic expression, specifically the world of poetry.
In his essay, "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,"
Stevens points out how the force of nobility— its
"inarticulate voice"— is the primary focus or
"business" of poets to acknowledge:
There is no element more conspicuously absent
from contemporary poetry that nobility. There is
no element that poets have sought after, more
curiously and more piously, certain of its
obscure existence. Its voice is one of the
inarticulate voices which is their business to
overhear and to record {NA 35) .
For Stevens, the condition, quality, character or
particularity of nobility, which he calls "the
particularity of the imagination" {NA 33) becomes for
artists their "spiritual height and depth" {NA 33).
Recall Poulet's essay "Criticism and the Experience of
Interiority" in which he argues that a level of mental
activity exists within the text which "reveals itself
to itself ... in its transcendence relative to all
which is reflected in it" (72). Poulet here seems to
articulate Stevens' sense of the idea of nobility and
its function in artistic expression. Perhaps more than
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any other type of abstraction or inner influence the
poet may seek, Stevens considers the force of nobility,
as the foundation of the work's creative ineffability
and indeterminacy, as fundamental to the existence and
sustenance of a living poetry.
On another level of interiority, Stevens' writing
often seems to become (or announce) a point or place of
convergence or merging which I refer to as
"psychotextual interiority." In Wallace Stevens: The
Poems of Our Climate, Harold Bloom writes of the idea
of poetic crossing in Stevens' work. Although Bloom's
analysis of Stevens is excellent, it is the merging of
text and mind in the creation of the poem which at
times places Stevens' work in an ineffable space of
psychological and textual interiority 3. In these
moments/spaces of psychotextual interiority, the
"presence" of the author, the reader, and the poem
itself are joined in such a way that the author and
reader nullify the other's influence and in effect
"disappear" and what remains is a poem--specifically a
poem about the simultaneous merging and disappearance
of writer and reader. This disappearance of the author
and reader is replaced by what Poulet calls "a certain
power of organization" (71) within the work itself, and
it is this power which effectively discloses, arranges
and potentially solves the dilemmas created by the
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disappearance of writer and reader. What remains is a
psychotextual consciousness represented in the form of
poetry. Poulet has written:
In short, there is no spider web without a
center, which is the spider. On the other hand,
it is not a question of going from the work to
the psychology of the author, but of going back,
within the sphere of the work, from the objective
elements systematically arranged, to a certain
power of organization inherent in the work
itself, as if the latter showed itself to be an
intentional consciousness determining its
arrangements and solving its problems. So that
it would scarcely be an abuse of terms to say
that it speaks , by means of its structural
elements, an authentic, a veritable language,
thanks to which it discloses itself and means
nothing but itself (71) .
The "structural elements" Poulet writes of here
have nothing to do with structuralism or its methods of
interpretation. Associating himself with the Geneva
school criticism of Marcel Raymond, Albert Beguin, Jean
Rousset, Jean-Pierre Richard and Jean Starobinski,
Poulet regards the structural element of the text as
"an intentional consciousness," or perhaps in Stevens'
phrase, "the central mind" — the representation of a
collected consciousness engaged in the search for
satisfaction. For the Geneva critics, literary
criticism is to be itself a form of criticism. As J.
Hillis Miller writes in his book Theory now and then,
such criticism
must therefore begin in an act of renunciation in
which the critic empties his mind of its personal
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qualities so that it may coincide completely with
the consciousness esqpressed in the words of the
author. His essay will be the record of this
coincidence. The ‘intimacy' necessary for
criticism, says Gorges Poulet, 'is not possible
unless the thought of the critic becomes the
thought of the author criticized, unless it
succeeds in re-tel ling, in re-thinking, in re-
imagining the author's thought from the inside
(author's emphasis, 15).
The life and meaning of the text, then, is not
simply governed by the role of the author as Maker
(what Roland Barthes has called "the Author God") or by
the interpretive function of the reader (as Reader
Response criticism would have one think) , but for
Poulet, and Stevens, there exists an element of
"veritable language" (Poulet 71) between the author and
reader which establishes and governs the possible
presence of what Marcel Raymond calls a sympathie
penetrante or penetrating sympathy (Miller, Theory then
and now 16) . As Miller writes, “only such a sympathie
penetrante will allow the critic to accomplish his
primary task, which is to ‘relive from the inside, ' by
a sort of knowledge from within, ' the experience of the
author as it is embodied in his words" (Miller, Theory
now and then 16) . And yet the question remains: How
does the critic manage to accomplish such a reliving or
reimagining of the text?
Miller points out in citing Beguin that for the
Geneva critics, "authentic literary criticism is only
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possible 'if the commentator situates himself in the
interior of the universe created by the author'"
(Miller Theory then and now 19) . For Raymond this
means that the critic must engage "the feeling of our
profound life" or "the elementary and quasi-mystical
feeling of existence" or "a general sense of existence"
or "an apprehension or a presentiment of the opaque,
irrational nebula— or existence as such--which subsists
beyond knowledge by means of the intellect" (Miller,
Theory now and then 18) . In short, the Geneva critics
advocate a criticism of consciousness, of feeling, of
spirit and mystery, of integration, transcendence and
joy. It is a criticism which aspires to the status of
poetry. As Miller writes of Marcel Raymond:
"Raymond's criticism seeks in its turn to capture in
poetry this mysticism of immanence, a 'confused and
delicious feeling of existence' in which 'the sense of
the self and the sense of the whole can no longer be
distinguished'" (Miller, Theory now and then 18). Such
an aim for criticism mirrors Stevens' own aim in
poetry.
The organization of Stevens' mental material,
regardless of the subject-matter of the organization
(the relationship between the visible and the
invisible, the changes of weather, the earth, human
contact, ideas of summer and winter, etc.), finds its
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Stevensian “centre," I believe, in the realization of a
mysterious kind of “structure" of stillness or silence.
It is at the point of the poem's stillness, silence or
namelessness, that moment in which things in the world
are seen and understood not just in terms of naming— an
objectifying imposition on the thing's naturally
protean ontological nature— but "In [the] measureless
measures" (CP 160) of certain relations of inferiority,
or what Stevens calls in his poem "A Clear Day and No
Memories," an "invisible activity" (OP 139). The poem
concludes with the following lines:
Today the air is clear of everything.
It has not knowledge except of nothingness
And it flows over us without meanings,
As if none of us had ever been here before
And are not now: in this shallow spectacle.
This invisible activity, this sense (OP 139).
What these conditions of stillness, silence and
namelessness signify is the poet's realization of the
interior occasion, the cry, the Orphic moment of poetry
in the consciousness of the poet. For Stevens, the
process of poetry, from the initial experience of the
world (“All our ideas come from the natural world:
Trees = umbrellas" (OP 189)) to the act of composition,
involves a translation of “The few things, the objects
of insight, the integrations / Of feeling, the things
that came of their own accord / Because he desired
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without quite knowing what" (OP 138) into a realization
that these "were the moments of the classic, the
beautiful. / These were that serene he had always been
approaching As toward an absolute foyer beyond romance"
(OP 138).
From Ideas of Order, "Autumn Refrain" may serve as
a good example of Stevens' achievement of psychotextual
merging and inferiority:
The skreak and skitter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun.
The sorrows of sun, too, gone . . . the moon and
moon.
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless
air
I have never— shall never hear . .And yet beneath
The stillness of everything gone, and being
still.
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skritting residuum.
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never— shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate
sound (CP 160).
How is Stevens' poem a reflection of psychological
and textual inferiority? The poem seems to concern
itself with the difficulty of naming things in the
world, and on a more theoretical level, it also plays
out the difficulty of the connection between the namer
(poet) and the thing named (images and ideas of the
poem) . Thus, in these ways, the poem seems to mark a
rather complex phenomenal moment when sound and
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silence, knowledge and not knowing, movement and
stillness, and structure and formlessness all merge
into a refrain of interior transmutation. It is the
enactment of these numerous and often unresolved
interior crossings in Stevens' poetry which
characterizes its ineffable quality and interpretive
difficulty. Nevertheless, it seems that it is at the
very point/moment of these crossing where/when the
reader most deeply engages the poetry of Stevens'
poems.
Recall the quotation from Georges Poulet's essay
"Criticism and Interiority, " in which he states that
"interior objects . . . are condemned to change their
very nature, condemned to lose their materiality" (58)
[by becoming] images, ideas, words, that is to say
purely mental entities. In "Autumn Refrain" nothing
(no-thing) exists wholly on its own accord, governing
only its material self. Rather, the condition of all
things within the poem (sun, moon, nightingale) are
connected to and contingent on two central forces of
non-contingency: "Some skreaking and skittering
residuum" and the "evasions" of the nightingale. These
two forces of non-contingency come to shape the poem
into "a purely mental entity" of sound and stillness.
The non-materiality of sound and stillness are the
keys to the poem; they are the centralizing forces of
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interiority of this Stevensian "refrain" (which in this
case most appropriately comes to suggest an act of
withholding or keeping inside) , particularly an autumn
refrain which suggests a time of ripeness and maturity,
a new beginning out of the desolation of the past. The
"autumnal inhalations" (NA 372) of ripeness and
maturity which Stevens writes offers the possibility of
the poet's artifice to imagine a balance between,
beginning and endings. The final canto of "Auroras of
Autumn: presents this possibility, as Stevens writes of
the rabbi who he calls to:
Turn back to where we were when we began:
An unhappy people in a happy world.
Now solemnize the secretive syllables.
Read to the congregation, for today
And for tomorrow, this extremity,
This contrivance of the spectre of spheres.
Contriving balance to contrive a whole.
The vital, the never-failing genius.
Fulfilling his meditations, great and small.
In these unhappy he meditates a whole,
The full of fortune and the full of fate,
As if he lived all lives, that he might know,
In hall harridan, not hushful paradise,
To a haggling of wind and weather, by these
lights
Like a blaze of summer straw, in a winter's nick
(CP 420).
Here the rabbi (the speaker or poet) , as well as
his congregation (his listeners or "readers"), if
offered the opportunity to engage and experience a
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moment of poetic equilibrium, as he (a) imagines a
place and time of beginning; (b) honors this vision in
"secretive syllables"; (c) contrives a balance of the
world, ("the spectre of spheres") within his
meditations; (d) achieves a finer metaphorical sense of
the "autumnal inhalations" (CP 372) of wind, weather,
summer and winter, heaven and earth, death and rebirth.
Stevens depicts the enormity of autumn with
cosmological as well as temporal-spatial significance,
and thus enables the poet to contemplate the auroras of
autumn in terms of "An ancestral theme or as a
consequence / Of an infinite course" (NA 412) .
The process of "Autumn Refrain, " from a
concentration on stasis and materiality to a condition
of signified space, and as a search for a particular
"skreaking and skritting residuum" within "The
stillness of everything gone, " brings us to the
following point Stevens makes in "The Noble Rider and
the Sound of Words":
The deepening need for words to express our
thoughts and feelings which, we are sure, are all
the truth that we shall ever experience, having
no illusions, make us listen to words when we
hear them, loving them and feeling them, makes us
search the sound of them, for a finality, a
perfection, an unalterable vibration, which it is
only within the power of the acutest poet to give
them {NA 32) .
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For Stevens, the sound of words is generally
understood as the sound of communication— sound as
sense--however we may see in Stevens' work several uses
of non-human communicative sounds which are, as he says
in "Credences of Summer," not part of the listener's
own sense" (377) but are part of the poet's ability to
make sense of the world. For example, Stevens gives
voice to the sea, to animals, to the movements and
manifestations of weather, to death, to nothingness; he
even gives voice to the possibility of a new voice, a
new poetic vision to be realized from the evasions of
sound.
"Autumn Refrain," I believe, promulgates Stevens'
desire for the articulation of this residing voice,
this new sound of poetry (in the desolate sound of the
nightingale within the stillness of the evening air) as
"a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration"
(NA 32) . For him, the most significant and meaningful
sounds of poetry may be the interior silence and
stillness of the poem itself as it forces the poet to
truly create, and not merely represent, the images and
ideas of the poem. In this respect, stillness and
silence lead to a stillness of being, a starting point
at which things in the world may be seen in the
"measureless measures" (CP 160) of their full
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potential, even without the evasion of metaphor, as
things-in-themselves.
In all that Stevens writes, whether the tone of
the writing is theoretical (didactic) or observational
(descriptive) , an attempt is made to reveal the images
and ideas of poetry within the complexities of the
subject he appears to be addressing, whether it be
religion, philosophy, politics, culture, criticism,
etc. The "position for poetry in the world today" (OP
253) , is, as he says, always "an inner position, never
certain, never fixed. It is to be found beneath the
poet's word and deep within the reader's eye in those
chambers in which the genius of poetry sits alone with
her candle in a moving solitude" (OP 253, my emphasis).
For Stevens, "poetry is an instrument of the will to
perceive the innumerable accords . . . that make life a
thing different than it would be without such insights"
(OP 252) , and from these innumerable accords and
relationships he is so interested in--between the
visible and invisible, reality and imagination, ideas
about the thing and the thing itself— Stevens comes to
associate the heightened awareness of the poet to a
necessary fulfillment he views as "one of the sanctions
of life" (OP 252).
She [poetry] is the spirit of visible and
invisible change. She knows that if poetry is
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one of the sanctions of life, if it is truly a
vital engagement between man and his environment
of the world, if it is genuinely a means by which
to achieve balance and measure in our
circumstances, it is something major and not
minor; and that if it is something major it must
have its place with other major things.
Individual poets, whatever their imperfections
may be, are driven all their lives by that inner
companion of the conscious which is, after all,
the genius of poetry in their hearts and minds.
(OP 252-3) .
The experience of the satisfaction of belief
through the act of living both in the mind
(imagination) and in the world (reality) provides the
artist moments of sanctification necessary to combat
what Stevens calls "the pressures of reality" (NA 20),
that is, ". . . the pressure of an external event on
the consciousness to the exclusion of any power of
contemplation" (NA 20) . 4 In this respect, poetry is
indeed "something major and not minor" (NA 252) , that
force which drives poets "... all their lives by
that inner companion of the conscious which is, after
all, the genius of poetry in their hearts and minds.
(OP 252-3) .
While it is true that Stevens was to play many
roles in his life— as poet, lawyer, husband, father,
grandfather, correspondent, friend, colleague— the role
he played most often was as the "metaphysician in the
dark" (CP 240) he writes of in "Of Modern Poetry."
Like the metaphysician, it is Stevens' desire for
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poetry, as well as for himself, to find— in the process
of being, living, seeking--moments of satisfaction and
belief to be enacted in a suitable language of "sudden
rightness" (CP 240) . "Of Modern Poetry" concludes with
the following lines highly charged poetic desire. He
writes:
The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightness, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot
descend
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind. (CP
240) .
What makes Stevens' work particularly difficult
for readers to understand is that for him poetry
simultaneously is (in the act of writing it,
experiencing it, or thinking about it) and signifies
(in what it suggests or speaks to) an expression of, or
search for, satisfaction in poetry. That is, the
search Stevens undertakes for himself to find some kind
of sanction through poetry is poetry, and it is the
profound and inherent connection he makes between the
act of writing a poem as an act of faith and the
pronouncement of the poem as a pronouncement of faith
(a faith in poetry, in one's ability to change reality
from substance to subtlety) which becomes a larger,
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more significant context which governs, as I see it,
his central vision of poetry: "Above all [poetry] is a
new engagement with life. It is that miracle to which
the true faith of the poet attaches itself" (OP 257, my
emphasis) .
For Stevens, poetry is indeed an engagement, a
miracle, a pronouncement of faith, "the finding of a
satisfaction," a willingness to believe in its power to
transform the world of reality through the subtleties
of imagination and lived experience. Moreover, and
contrary to the numerous critical publications on
Stevens' work which find their focus centered on the
ideas of negativity, bareness, misery, and nothingness
in Stevens, I see his poetic project as an ameliorative
call to faith and belief. It is out of one's awareness
of the domination of black, "the nothing that is not
there" and "the nothing that is," "the bareness of the
fertile thing that can attain no more, " the world
demythologized to the point of purposeless chaos
(Jarraway 30) that a new perception and psychology of
the world may be attempted and realized. Stevens'
works are, in effect, imaginative close readings of
particular aspects of the world which find no final
resolution or completion of meaning in their
manifestation, construction or argument, but rather
guide the poet to seek a more complete vision and
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understanding of things through an almost invisible
interiority of meditative "in-sight." As Stevens
meditates in the poem "Meditation":
How long have I meditated, 0 Prince,
On sky and earth?
It comes to this,
That even the moon
Has exhausted its emotions.
What is that I think of, truly?
The lines of blackberry bushes.
The design of leaves—
Neither sky nor earth
Express themselves before me . . .
Bossuet did not preach at the funerals
Of puppets (OP 28).
The poem raises a rather difficult question to answer:
What does Stevens think about? From the dainty and
colorful characteristics of Harmonium to the
philosophical boldness of The Rock, Stevens search for
satisfaction is enacted in the poem, and thus the
potential of poetry to bring about a final stillness, a
"no-thing-ness," a demystification of the gods in the
form of interiorized poetic meditations, is made
manifest in Stevens' poetic performances of belief.
Stevens' quest for a meditative stillness of being and
belief is, I believe, at the center (what he often
calls the "centre") of all his writing, and it is this
belief, as a subject of his writing, which also governs
and unifies his work.
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Notes
1. This theory of interiorization is my own. While I
will find it necessary to borrow critical concepts from
Georges Poulet in order to develop my understanding of
interiorization in Stevens, I do so as a means of
support and not as an adoption of a particular critic's
ideology or a particular school or method of critical
reading.
2. The idea of nobility, which Stevens concentrates on
significantly in the "Noble Rider and the Sound of
Words," will be discussed at length in a later chapter
of this dissertation.
3. Psychotextual merging is, as far as I know, my own
term. The aim of the analysis here is to not simply
adopt a theory of reading already in circulation, but
to find for myself, out of all the theories of reading
I am familiar with, one which is not specifically
governed by its own set of theoretical terms and
premises.
4. Charles Altieri, in his essay, "Why Stevens Must Be
Abstract, or What a Poet Can Learn from Painting,"
states: "The one thing [Stevens'] studies made
overwhelmingly evident was that all of the arts seemed
to confront the same antagonist— which he called 'the
pressure of reality.'" Stevens' most concentrated
discussion of "the pressure of reality" appears in his
essay, "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" from
The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the
Imagination.
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Works Cited
Altieri, Charles. "Why Stevens Must Be Abstract, or
What a Poet Can Learn from Painting." Wallace
Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism, edited by
Albert Gelpi. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985.
Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our
Climate. Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 1977.
The Breaking of the Vessels. Chicago
and London: The University of Chicago Press,
1982.
Fisher, Barbara M. Wallace Stevens: The Intensest
Rendezvous. Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 1990.
Gelpi, Albert, ed- Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of
Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985.
Jarraway, David J. Wallace Stevens and the Question of
Belief: Metaphysician in the Dark. Baton Rouge
and London: Louisiana State University Press,
1993.
Miller, J. Hillis. "Wallace Stevens' Poetry of Being."
The Act of the Mind: Essays on the Poetry of
Wallace Stevens, eds. Roy Harvey Pearce and J.
Hillis Miller. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
Press, 1965.
Theory now and then, Durham: Duke
University Press, 1991.
Poulet, Georges. "Criticism and the Experience of
Inferiority." The Languages of Criticism and the
Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy,
eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato.
Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1970.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace
Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.
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Letters of Wallace Stevens. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.
The Necessary Angel: Essays on
Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage
Books, 1951.
Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays,
Prose. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
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The exquisite environment of fact. The final poem will
be the poem of fact in the language of fact. But it
will be the poem of fact not realized before.
Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous
Everything tends to become real; or everything moves in
the direction of reality.
Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous
The world is a force, not a presence.
Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous
CHAPTER THREE:
STEVENS' FACTUAL POETICS: THE ANGEL OF REALITY
AND "CREDENCES OF SUMMER"
In her introduction to Wallace Stevens: Words
Chosen Out of Desire, Helen Vendler points out that
"Stevens' austerity of language perhaps keeps his work
from being a poetry for everyone, but it is not poetry
for, or about, a world of ghosts. It springs from
fact, and the trajectory it traces is one Stevens
himself described" (9) . Vendler then continues to
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provide evidence of Stevens' self-described poetic
trajectory with a quotation which followed "Examination
of the Hero in a Time of War" in Parts of a World.
Stevens writes:
We leave fact and come back to it, come back to
what we wanted fact to be, not to what it was,
not to what it has too often remained. The
poetry of a work of the imagination constantly
illustrates the fundamental and endless struggle
with fact (OP 242)
Stevens' work, as much as it is concerned with the
activity of the imagination, it is equally concerned
with the world of fact. For Stevens, the relationship
between imagination and fact (what he most often refers
to as the presence of "reality") is the foundation of
every poetic act. Their intertwining is primordial and
undeniable, and not something which can be undone by
careful analysis or methodical reduction. And so,
Stevens' illustrates in his work "the fundamental and
endless struggle with fact" that the artistic
imagination continuously confronts. This confrontation
signifies the beginning, the very possibility of the
creation of poetry.
For Stevens, the poetry of the imagination is
dependent on the knowledge "that there must be in the
world about us things that solace us quite as fully as
any heavenly visitation could" Letters 661). Such
things are of the earth, they are human-made and of
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factual tangibility; they are, as Stevens says in
"Credences of Summer, " "Things certain sustaining us in
certainty" (CP 375) . How, then, does Stevens' work,
which most critics agree is indeed difficult to
interpret on the level of fact— particularly the later
poems of Transport to Summer, The Auroras of Autumn and
The Rock, which are generally considered the most
theoretical or philosophical--find its source in
actuality, reality, things as they are? I believe
that Stevens either manages subtilize the reality of
fact into an imaginative moment and thus create a
poetic act ("By poetic act I mean an act that is a
projection of poetry into reality" (OP 255)) or he
portrays an image of reality (presence) at a very
specific point in its appearance to the seer, and,
paradoxically, that point is often exactly at the
moment of the image's disappearance from the seer's
view as a moment of simultaneous presence and absence.
As Stevens states in the "Adagia," "To 'subtilize
experience' = to apprehend the complexity of the world,
to perceive the intricacy of appearance" (OP 201) , and
it is at the very moment of this perceptive transition
from substance (the thing "is") to subtlety (the thing
"seems") that poetry awakens the mind of the poet and
enables the poem to appear "In a savage and subtle and
simple harmony / A matching and mating of surprised
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accords / A responding to a diviner opposite" (CP,
468) .
In an acceptance speech for receiving an honorary
degree from Bard College in 1951, Stevens speaks of the
idea, nature and value of "a poetic act." As an
example of reality as "the life that is lived in the
scene that it composes" (NA 25) , Stevens associates
one's "awareness of poetic acts" (OP 256) to "our sense
of the texture of life" (OP 256). He begins his
address by using the occasion for his speech to
introduce his subject and thereby stress the idea that
poetry, or the poetic, is a significant and important
part of life. He begins: "The act of conferring an
honor on a poet is a poetic act. By poetic act I mean
an act that is a projection of poetry into reality."
(OP 255). Throughout the course of the speech Stevens
places an increasing amount of emphasis on the
importance of reality in the formation or creation of
poetry. His aim of stressing the importance of reality
in the creation of a poetic act is to illustrate that
it indeed has an existence, a living purpose as "the
extremest power / Living and being about us and being /
Ours, like a familiar companion" (CP, 276) . He says:
"But I want to be quite certain that you recognize that
I am talking about something existing, not about
something purely poetic; and for that reason I add one
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or two more examples from actuality" (OP 256) . And
this is precisely what Stevens does in order to
demonstrate, not argue as proof, that "The activity of
the unreal in reality, that is to say, the activities
of poetry in everyday life" (OP 256) indeed have a
place in the "visible life about us" (OP 256) . He
maintains that "we find the poetic act in lesser and
everyday things and situations in reality, as for
example, in the mere act of looking at a photograph of
someone who is absent or in writing a letter to a
person at a distance" (OP 255).
For Stevens, the poem attains its "truth" in its
connection to reality:
The poet finds that as between these two sources:
the imagination and reality, the imagination is
false, whatever else may be said of it and
reality is true; and being concerned that poetry
should be a thing of vital and virile importance
he commits himself to reality, which then becomes
his inescapable and ever present difficulty and
inamorata (OP 256) .
Having here committed himself to reality, Stevens
is then prompted to comment on its significance not
merely in but as the world. Since he clearly
associates the idea of the poetic to everyday
experience, its value is to heighten the awareness and
understanding of the world not just for the poet but
for every man and woman who carefully looks at, and
listens to, the protean world. He writes:
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Instead of having lost anything, [the poet] has
gained a sense of direction and a certainty of
understanding. He has strengthened himself to
resist the bogus. He has become like a man who
can see what he wants to see and touch what he
wants to touch. In all his poems with all their
enchantments for the poet himself, there is the
final enchantment that they are true. The
significance of the poetic act then is that it is
evidence. It is instance and illustration. It
is an illumination of a surface, the movement of
a self in the rock. Above all, it is a new
engagement with life. It is that miracle to
which the true faith of the poet attaches itself
(OP 256-57) .
The reality of the poetic act is truth, but it is
a typically Stevensian kind of truth which is never
completed or finalized in terms of meaning. Rather,
for Stevens, the truth of the poem is associated with
its expressions of evidence, instance, illustration,
and engagement; it is a truth of poetic perception
which is wholly concrete and particular, and thus
satisfying in its particular "sense of direction and
certainty of understanding" (OP 256).
Although Stevens clearly reveals his idea of the
truth of reality in experience, exactly what Stevens
means by "reality" is never quite clearly revealed, and
thus the word often creates more confusion for the
reader them clarification. Frank Doggett in his
Stevens' Poetry of Thought manages to conceptualize the
numerous forms and meanings of reality in Stevens.
Doggett writes:
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Reality in Stevens' use of the word, may be the
world supposed to be antecedent in itself or the
world created in the specific occurrence of
thought, including the thinker himself and his
mind forming the thought. Often the term offers
the assumption that if the self is the central
point of a circle of infinite radius, then
reality is the not-self, including all except the
abstract subjective center. Sometimes reality is
used in the context of the nominalist position—
then the word denotes that which is actual and
stands as a phenomenal identity, the existent as
opposed to the merely fancied. Stevens usually
means by reality an undetermined base on which a
mind constructs its personal sense of the world.
Occasionally he will use the word real as a term
of approval, as a substitute for the word true,
and therefore, no more than an expression of
confidence (200).
One of Stevens' best known poems of reality,
"Angel Surrounded by Paysans," exemplifies, I believe,
the complexity and variousness of meaning Stevens
ascribes not so much to the word "reality" but to its
potentially forceful, subtle, and conditional
manifestations in poetry.
In a letter to Victor Hammer, Stevens writes of
his representation of the angel of reality in "Angel
Surrounded by Paysans." Even though Stevens claims
that the figure is the angel of reality, it is not
completely bound to the ontological conditions of a
factual presence and thus evades total self-revelation
or self-definition. Stevens seems more set on
depicting a "subtilized" figure of reality, something
suggestive of the ineffable nature or "ousia," of the
figure of the angel:
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I have already suggested that one way of handling
the thing would be to evade any definite
representation but to depict the figure the
moment after it had vanished leaving behind it
tokens of its effulgence, but that is only my way
of thinking about it" (Letters 661).
Why an angel of reality? For Stevens, the notion
that reality may only be defined by things experienced
by one's senses, the actual, or only by the force of
presence or presentness, is often challenged as
misleading or false. In this respect, Stevens connects
the figure of the angel— which is, of course, a poetic
figure which "exists" in the realm of the unreal, the
invisible--to the idea of reality in order to challenge
the reader's understanding of "reality" and "truth" as
things merely "seen" in a state of completion or
finalized form. What is real and true for Stevens, I
believe, is that all things, all ideas, images, words,
interpretations, feelings, etc., are fundamentally
governed by the poetic imagination and thus always
moving and changing in response to the movements and
changes of the imaginative mind of the artist. What
this generates is not a poetry of the representation of
total factual reality but a poetry of the reality of
Mind or perception which Stevens describes as "the poem
of the act of the mind" (CP 240)— that is, the never-
ending process of keeping language, and thus reality,
alive and active.
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When Stevens writes of the poet's "endless
struggle with fact" (OP 243) , he seems to be writing of
reality as a protean force governed by, like everything
else in Stevens' poetics, the imagination of the poet.
What remains to be considered is not the dominance of
the imagination over reality (or reality over
imagination) , but, as he says, "tokens of effulgence"
which the relationship creates. As Stevens says in
"Autumn Refrain," "something resides, some skreaking
and skritting residuum" (CP 160) of momentary light, of
sound, of thought, of awareness which, on the one hand
places poetry within the world of factual reality, but
on the other hand heightens and subtilizes the factual
through imagination. I will argue that these moments
of "defactualization" through integration ("The real is
constantly being engulfed in the unreal" (OP 255))
constitute Stevens' connection to "The exquisite
environment of fact" (OP 190) , an environment of
reality not represented by "static, solid objects
extended in space, but the life that is lived in the
scene that it composes" (NA 25).
"Angel Surrounded by Paysans" concludes the
collection of poems in Stevens' The Auroras of Autumn
and celebrates what he calls "the necessary angel of
earth" (496) and may serve as a good example of
Stevens' rather complex perspective on the subtlety of
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reality. It has been well documented that the poem is
based on an actual piece of art, a painting by Tal Coat
entitled "Still Life, " and thus has its foundation in
fact. And yet, of the painting, Stevens remarks on how
the picture transforms one's sense of things" (Letters
649) . He writes: "For all its in-door light on in
door objects, the picture refreshes one with an out
door sense of things" (Letters 649) . And so, the
"still life" that Stevens begins with is put into
motion through a series of in-door (interior mental
constructions or perspectives) and out-door (things of
the world) integrations and relationships: angel and
man, presence and absence, earth and the other world,
stability ("I am the angel of reality, / Seen for a
moment standing in the door") and motion ("Rise
liquidly in liquid lingerings"), and ontology and
epistemology ("I am one of you and being one of you /
Is being and knowing what I am and know") . Since this
poem of reality engages all of these various
relationships at once, it may be best to consider it in
its various forms, stanza by stanza.
The poem begins with an interchange, a dialogue of
sorts, between a human, earth-bound form (one of the
countrymen) and the angel of reality. From the
beginning readers are not so much forced to tread a
line between human and non-human language and
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sensibility but to meditate on their integration and
interaction:
One of the countrymen:
There is
A welcome at the door to which no one comes?
The angel-.
I am the angel of reality,
Seen for a moment standing in the door.
I have neither ashen wing nor wear of ore
And live without a tepid aureole.
Or stars that follow me, not to attend.
But, of my being and its knowing, part.
I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know (CP 496) .
Janet McCann has written in her recent book,
Wallace Stevens Revisited: "The Celestial Possible"
that the these lines "mock the traditional angel
apparatus as a cliche" (118); however, she does see the
function of the angel as angelic. She writes that
"[the angel's] annunciation is the reality of the world
and its renewal. His vision is to refresh, to make
visible the world as it is, without falsifications"
(118) . The figure of the angel is able to approach the
task "to make visible the world as it is" by embodying
the level of human awareness and understanding that the
countryman, representing every man and woman, knows,
believes in, and lives everyday. Stevens' integration
of one reality to another is actually a momentary
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integration which, while not sustainable, allows the
real (human) and unreal (angel) to merge and alter the
poem as an expression of being and perception. The
angel's declaration of "I am one of you and being one
of you / Is being and knowing what I am" announces the
moment of what may be called an "ontoepistemological
merging," "as the angel of ‘reality' momentarily
stands, like a welcomed peasant himself, at the opened
door; he cannot be 'seen' except in relation to the
peasants themselves" (Filreis 364). The angel defines
himself in relation to the peasants so that they might
see him not as a projection or image of heaven but as
one of them (Filreis 364). The poem continues:
Yet I am the necessary angel of earth.
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again.
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked
set,
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone (CP
496-497).
Here Stevens' angel declares the meaning of the
relation he has assumed with the peasants as their
“sense of these things changes and they change / Not as
in metaphor, but in our sense / Of them. So sense
exceeds all metaphor" (CP 431) . As Alan Filreis
writes: “The angel of the imagination is an angel only
by virtue of his relation to the earth, only in terms
provided by the countryman's basic question: What
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peasant like myself is at my door?" (364). Filreis
continues to state that "the question is about
similarity (someone there) and visibility (someone
there) and temporarily defends, though does not employ,
'mere description'" (364). While this may be true, the
poem seems to be more generally about the relation of
one perception of reality to another. This is the
angel's task: to clear the earth of its "stiff and
stubborn, man-locked set" of relations which serve to
define a reality antithetical to a vision of the earth
(of reality) which may
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,
Like watery words awash; like meanings said
By repetitions of ha If-meanings. Am I not,
Myself, only half a figure of a sort (CP 497).
This wonderfully complex motion of sound and
signification--achieved largely by syllabic stress and
alliterative leaps like "liquidly in liquid lingerings
/ Like watery words awash, "— best enact, I believe,
Stevens' sense of the idea that reality is always
flowing and changing, and thus always presenting itself
to the poet from new angles of perception and with new
sounds of sense. For him, reality moves "liquidly in
liquid lingerings / Like watery words awash, " and thus
may best be interpreted, as he writes in "Bouquet of
Roses in Sunlight, " "like a flow of meanings with no
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speech / And of as many meanings as of men" (CP 430) .
The elusive and instantaneous nature of the figure of
the angel is Stevens' final comment on the movements
and workings of reality and thus concludes the poem:
A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition appareled in
Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am
gone? (CP 497)
"Angel Surrounded by Pay sans" is, as I have
suggested, a poem about reality through the integration
and merging of several relational forces and
conditions. These in turn give shape to Stevens'
representation of reality as a kind of "liquid
lingering" (CP 497) of half-meanings" (CP 497) which
govern his own perspective of presence or presentness
in term of the poetry (the poetic) which governs
reality.
The idea of presence, presentness or place is
indeed very important to Stevens' work, as he gave
emphasis to the importance of positioning the poem/poet
in a specific location or space--whether it be to
specify, abstract, describe or disrupt the location or
space— in order to represent that space in its
condition of its appearance and becoming. However, the
manifestations of presence in Stevens are not limited
to merely the physicality of location, but may also
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suggest many more wide-ranging and significant
connotations regarding the complexity surrounding the
idea of mental or interpretive representations of
presence in poetry.
Presence as Representation and Interpretation
For Stevens, the visual certainty of an image or
figure, that is to say, its "factual" certainty of
visual presence, is often called into question. The
point of visual interest in Stevens' poetry seems to be
not things seen, but things "as" seen, and so readers
are often placed in the midst of the poet's vision at a
very specific moment when things seen become things as
seen, or as Stevens says, "things as they are." This
transitional moment that Stevens makes from factual
vision to imaginative perception is one he often
illustrates as "poetic vision," a particular vision of
reality (presence) on which he must rely in order to
see things "as" they are. The "as" operates as an
"equivalence term" (Altieri 106) for Stevens and is
vital to his rendering of reality in terms of moments
of visual perception (mental/visual) and not simply in
terms of what Shakespeare's Othello calls "the ocular
proof." As Charles Altieri writes in "Why Stevens Must
Be Abstract, or What a Poet Can Learn From Painting, "
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this idea of the "visibility of thought" may have
rather far-reaching implications for the poet who
employs the word "as" as a kind of equivalence term.
He writes:
The as positions the poet beyond the differences
that perspectivism insists upon, yet allows him
to show how the various attitudes might be
available to everyone, a "visibility of thought,
/ in which hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at
once" (CP 488) . For the one mind can see as each
of those eyes might see, yet make its reflections
on that sight available to all (106).
The idea of the poet's achievement of a
"visibility of thought, / in which hundreds of eyes, in
one mind, see at once" seems to be a rather reductive
reading of the poet's all-powerful (according to
Altieri) ability to recognize and interpret the very
movement of signification through the use of "as."
However, the "various attitudes" that Altieri writes of
supports the larger notion that "as," as both a
referent for manifestation (that which is made visibly
present) and interpretation (that which is made visibly
present is also, and at the same time, that which is
made known) may also be viewed as something never to be
reduced into a universally accepted, factual rendering
of the "thing itself." Rather than positioning the
poet beyond various attitudes and interpretations given
to a particular idea or image, the "as" places the
artist in the midst of their complexity, a complexity
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impossible to reduce and capture on the level of
presence.
Jacques Derrida writes of the function of the sign
(referent) in the manner I refer to as the function of
"as" in the constructions of presence in Stevens' work.
Derrida's sign and Stevens' "as" both essentially
operate as signifiers, that is, they are what Derrida
calls "interpretants. * In Of Grammatology, Derrida
states:
There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign
or the representer so that the thing signified
maybe allowed to glow finally in the luminosity
of its presence. The so-called 'thing itself' is
always already a representamen shielded from the
simplicity of intuitive evidence. The
representamen functions only by giving rise to an
interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on
to infinity. The self-identity of the signified
conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the
move (49) .
For Derrida, as well as Stevens, the "thing
itself" is most accurately known as a representation, a
representamen, of the numerous signs and sets of
conditions which determine its existence. In this
respect, the "thing itself" is never completely a thing
in itself, a completely self-made and self-defining
entity. Like Stevens' "as," the thing itself is also a
referent to a entire set of unseen influences and
interpretations which the poet (artist) always seeks to
experience. Thus, the chain of signification which
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deconstruction speaks of as the foundation and movement
("play") of language is actually a chain of
(sign) ification which itself is governed by continuous
representation and interpretation (the giving rise to
an interpretant) which makes so-called apodictic
thought and representation a virtual impossibility.
The thing itself, seen completely as it is,
becomes a thing made almost intangible and transparent
by (sign) ification. As that which is informed by
something other than itself, "the thing itself" must
also have something to do with the absence of presence.
Derrida writes of this very point in Speech and
Phenomena:
Signs represent the present in its absence; they
take the place of the present. When we cannot
take hold of or show the thing, let us say the
present, the being-present, when the present does
not present itself, then we signify, we go
through the detour of signs. We take up or give
signs; we make signs. The sign would thus be a
deferred presence. Whether it is a question of
verbal or written signs, monetary signs,
electoral delegates, or political
representatives, the movement of signs defers the
movement of encountering the thing itself, the
movement at which we could lay hold to it,
consume or expend it touch it, see it, have a
present intuition of it (138).
Although Stevens describes his poetic project in
terms of the relationship between "reality" (the real,
the factual) and "imagination" (the unreal), Derrida's
words are, I believe, a good description of Stevens'
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sense of poetry as the representation and
interpretation of a deferred presence. The reader is
constantly faced with Stevens' poetic encounters of
deference, of "perpetual reference" (CP 466) and
"perpetual meditation," (CP 466) so that the thing
itself is never completely realized but rather seen in
the representation and interpretation of another
"secondary and provisional" sign (Derrida, Speech and
Phenomena 138) . As Stevens states at the conclusion of
the second section of "An Ordinary Evening in New
Haven, " a wonderful poem which comments on the
complexity of vision and presence, reference and
meditation are on-going processes:
In the perpetual reference, object
Of the perpetual meditation, point
Of the enduring, visionary love.
Obscure, in colors whether of the sun
Or mind, uncertain in the clearest bells,
The spirit's speeches, the indefinite,
Confused illuminations and sonorities.
So much of ourselves, we cannot tell apart
The idea and the bearer-being of the idea (CP
466) .
For Stevens, presence becomes a "perpetual
reference," a secondary and provisional substitute for
an original and lost presence (Derrida, Speech and
Phenomena 138). However, even as secondary,
provisional and marginal to the original presence— the
a priori origin, the beginning— the importance/presence
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of these secondary presences are not lost to the poet.
These images and figures best depict or embody Stevens'
fascination with the relationship between the real and
the unreal. As a presence that is both physical and
non-physical, primordial and deferred, figures like the
angel of reality in "Angel Surrounded by Paysans" most
accurately represent what are for Stevens the governing
forces of poetry: reality (the real) and imagination
(unreal). Derrida writes of the "secondary and
provisional aspects" of these figures/images of
deferred presence.
In attempting to catch sight of these secondary
and provisional aspects of the substitute, we
shall no doubt catch sight of something like a
primordial difference. Yet we could no longer
even call it primordial or final, inasmuch as the
characteristics of origin, beginning, telos,
eschaton, etc., have always denoted presence—
ousia, paxaousia, etc. (139).
These are the images which merely approximate the
"centre" of perception Stevens speaks of in "Credences
of Summer." Yet, as David LaGuardia writes in his
Advance on Chaos: The Sanctifying Imagination of
Wallace Stevens:
With each approximation the poet enacts a ritual
of self-creation that insures his attunement of
the forward propulsion of reality and to the holy
center that generates the thrust of world and
mind alike. The imagination contends with a
power outside it by an internal power equal in
force (124).
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As stated earlier, Stevens finds "the holy center"
in moments of satisfaction and belief which are, at
best, approximations of a final belief, a final truth
which remains deferred. And yet the question remains,
are the momentary experiences of deferred presence
worth seeking out, investigating and interpreting? In
a world of solid, static figures/images of reality—
figures/images which begin and end on the level of
fact— Stevens' world of fact, is, as he says, "what
[the poet] wanted fact to be" (OP 242) . For Stevens,
the world of fact is a world made subtle by the
sanctifying influence of imagination. And so, while
"vision" and knowledge may merely come in moments and
thus be experienced only in half-lights--through the
manifestation, representation and interpretation of
secondary, even absent, signs (signifiers)— and not
sustained by any sense of finality or conclusion,
Stevens' work is not completely governed by images or
ideas of momentary experience. In fact, he states that
it is his aim in poetry to create a momentary existence
on an exquisite plane (OP 228, my emphasis) . Momentary
is the space, the figures, the scene, and the reality
revealed, although for Stevens, this is the poet's
finest and truest glimpse at the world as it actually
is— the "giant ever changing, living in change" (CP
443) .
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Presence as Truth
Since, as we have seen, Stevens manifests the
physicality and factualness of presence through the use
of images and figures which at best depict its
existence in a continuous state of deferral, is the
"truth" of Stevens' figures of presence also deferred
into something else, something false? Truth,
specifically "poetic truth," is described by Stevens in
an 1943 essay, "The Figure of the Youth as a Virile
Poet," as what he refers to as "factual truth." Here
Stevens asks the following question:
Do we not begin to think of the possibility that
poetry is only reality, after all, and that
poetic truth is a factual truth, seen, it may be,
by those whose range in the perception of fact—
that is, whose sensibility— is greater than our
own? (NA 59)
The "answer" Stevens provides to his own question
emphasizes the importance of the phrase "range in
perception of fact, " since it is from that point of
view [that] the truth we experience when we are in
agreement with reality is the truth of fact {NA 59) .
For Stevens, to be in agreement with "the truth of
fact" is to understand the idea of fact as essentially
poetic, that is, as something made possible through the
"range of perception" and "sensibility" which the poet
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naturally brings to or experiences within a scene.
Fact, then, signifies as kind of heightened awareness
for Stevens. He writes that
when men, baffled by philosophic truth, turn to
poetic truth, they return to their starting
point, they return to fact, not, it ought to be
clear, to bare fact (or call it absolute fact) ,
but to fact beyond their perception in the first
instance and outside the normal range of their
sensibility (NA 59-60).
From The Collected Poems "Credences of Summer"
achieves the level of fact and presence Stevens speaks
of; in this respect, the poem's "range of perception"
moves from the manifestation of "bare fact (or absolute
fact)" to a manifestation of "fact beyond the [the
poet's] perception in the first instance and outside
the normal range of [his] sensibility" (NA 60) . Even
though, as Harold Bloom has stated, "there is something
equivocal about the poem that stimulates sharp
disagreements among its readers" (Wallace Stevens: The
Poems of Our Climate 242), "Credences of Summer" still
remains one of Stevens' greatest poems of reality, and
is therefore a fine commentary on the ideas of presence
and fact. Frank Kermode, in his book Wallace Stevens,
has written that the poem "is an example of that
incantatory power, the tone of rapture, Stevens
sometimes brings to meditation, and is undoubtedly one
of his great poems. The subject is total satisfaction,
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the moment of total summer" (97) . A. Walton Litz has
written that in the poem "Stevens embodies his most
sustained vision of the reality of summer" (283).
Helen Vendler has written in On Extended Wings that the
poem's
initial impetus of praise and involvement,
resolutely kept in the original moment, is
maintained through the first three cantos, but
from then on the oneness with the here and now
diminishes, until by the end of the poem Stevens
is at an inhuman distance from his starting point
(234).
And Stevens himself comments in a letter to
Bernard Heringman on the "imaginative period" surround
the writing of "Credences of Summer" :
At the moment I am at work on a thing called An
Ordinary Evening in New Haven .... here my
interest is to try to get as close to the
ordinary, the commonplace and the ugly as it is
possible for a poet to get. It is not a question
of grim reality but of plain reality. The object
is of course to purge oneself of anything false.
I have been doing this since the beginning of
March and intend to keep studying the subject and
working on it until I am quite through with it.
This is not in any sense a turning away from the
ideas of Credences of Summer: it is a development
of those ideas. That sort of thing might
ultimately lead to another phase of what you call
a seasonal sequence but certainly it would have
nothing to do with the weather: it would have to
do with the drift of one's ideas (Letters 636-
637) .
Of the critics mentioned, I believe Vendler comes
closest to the idea Stevens writes of here— the notion
of how "Credences of Summer" has to do "with the drift
of one's ideas." She writes: "To fix the attention on
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the present is not at all a new idea in Stevens' verse;
what is new is the expression of the idea in the
present tense, in the actual scene, in the poetry of
"this" and "here" and "now" (234) . Yet, although
"Credences of Summer, " as a poem of the "this" and
"here" and "now, " is voiced in the present tense, the
poem's difficulty lies not in its tense but in its
subtle transition from the presentation of the presence
of "bare fact" to Stevens' manipulation and
transformation of this level of presence through a
particular "range in the perception of fact" used to
construct an individual reality and of the world.
"Credences of Summer," as the title suggests, is
initially presented as a quest for assurance, a
statement from the mind of one who is free of doubt,
one who is assured of the certainty of someone or
something. However, as Helen Vendler has written, the
poem eventually betrays its own title (as a "credence")
in that it "is the creed of the believer rather than
the certain projection of the prophet" (On Extended
Wings 234) whose "intention cannot all command the
strings" (On Extended Wings 234) of the physical world
of fact, presence, and reality. The poem begins
securely locked in the physicality and specificity of
time and place, as this is what the poet ponders. The
poem begins:
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Now in midsummer come and all fools slaughtered
And spring's infuriations over and a long way
To the first autumnal inhalations, young broods
Are in the grass, the roses are heavy with a
weight
Of fragrance and the mind lays by its trouble.
Now the mind lays by its trouble and considers.
The figits of remembrance come to this.
This is the last day of a certain year
Beyond which there is nothing left of time.
It comes to this and the imagination's life (CP
372) .
The physical bareness and finality of Stevens'
scene is set; however together the two opening stanzas
create scenes both of simultaneous ending and
beginning. As the strength of the physical scene
slowly diminishes in its presence, the power or
influence of the imagination is acknowledged. As
Stevens writes; "This is the last day of a certain year
/ Beyond which there is nothing left of time. / It
comes to this and the imagination's life" (CP 372). In
this reduction of the world to timeless imagination,
the potential for the poet to realize the truth of
presence, of fact, of reality, of "the thing itself" is
made possible. For Stevens however, the realization of
reality as the thing in-itself, something wholly self-
contained and self-governing, is a realization made
possible only in the imagination. It is that
possibility of the poetic imagination to reveal in
reality its "centre" which is the subject of the
following three stanzas of the poem, canto II:
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Postpone the anatomy of summer, as
The physical pine, the metaphysical pine.
Let's see the very thing and nothing else.
Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight.
Burn everything not part of it to ash.
Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky
Without evasion by a single metaphor.
Look at it in its essential barrenness
And say this, this is the centre that I seek.
Fix it in an eternal foliage
And fill the foliage with arrested peace,
Joy of such permanence, right ignorance
Of change still possible. Exile desire
For what is not. This is the barrenness
Of the fertile thing that can attain no more (CP
373) .
In a poem filled with declarations of what "is"--
as Vendler sates, "the eye is not allowed to stray, but
is kept tightly bound by the repetitive 'this' and
'here' of successive lines" (On Extended Wings 234)—
these three stanzas perhaps constitute Stevens' most
declarative moment in poetry. The construction of
presence through the use of the phrase "This is" firmly
positions the poem "on this present ground, " however
the "centre" Stevens seeks, a centre of origin beyond
metaphor, also takes him away from the complete
productivity and fertility of his "credence" of summer.
Stevens creates a paradoxical summer vision as
static motion ("Joy of such permanence, right ignorance
/ Of change still possible.") and as barren fertility
("This is the barrenness of / Of the fertile thing
that can attain no more."), such that the "centre" he
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seeks is deferred to a kind of bareness which, as
Richard Poirier points out in his The Renewal of
Literature plays an important role in Stevens' work.
Poirier observes that
literature implicitly idealizes that condition of
bareness, that thinness of social and cultural
circumstance, which, according to Henry James and
other observers, was supposed to be the special
plight of American writers. For Emerson, William
James, and Wallace Stevens, however, leaving
aside for a moment the differences in their lives
and social opportunities, "bareness" is, as I
have said, very often salutary, something to be
sought after (11) .
Stevens' declaration to "Postpone the anatomy of
summer" is a calling to strip reality of its purely
physical "false disasters" (CF 372), "Burn everything
not part of it to ash," (CP 373) and to find in this
"essential barrenness" the sanctifying power of the
imagination's life.
The factual reality and physicality of presence
which Stevens seeks in "Credences of Slimmer" is indeed
connected to what he calls an "imaginative aspect" (NA
60) . As he writes: "We have excluded fact as an
element of poetic truth. But this has been done
arbitrarily and with a sense of absolute fact as fact
destitute of any imaginative aspect whatever" (NA 60).
The imaginative aspect of Stevens' "centre" then, even
though it may be connected to an idea of "barrenness"
or "bareness," evolves into a state of mind, a clarity
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of vision. In a late poem entitled "Artificial
Populations," Stevens writes:
The centre that he sought was a state of mind,
Nothing more, like weather after it has cleared—
Well, more that, like weather when it has cleared
And the two poles continue to maintain it (OP
138) .
Stevens locates his "centre" in the subsequent
three-stanza canto of the poem. The "barrenness / Of
the fertile thing that can attain no more" is depicted
as "the natural tower of all the world" (CP 373), "the
final mountain" (CP 373) . The poem proceeds:
It is the natural tower of all the world.
The point of survey, green's green apogee,
But a tower more precious than the view beyond,
A point of survey squatting like a throne.
Axis of everything, green's apogee
And happiest folk-land, mostly marriage-hymns.
It is the mountain on which the tower stands,
It is the final mountain. Here the sun,
Sleepless, inhales his proper air, and rests.
This is the refuge that the end creates (CP 373) .
In rather typical Stevensian fashion, the total
reality of the physical world is represented in a
description of a single, all-encompassing relational
image which itself maintains its own relation to other
previously revealed images. "The barrenness of the
fertile thing that can attain no more" becomes "The
natural tower of all the world, " which, in turn,
becomes "The mountain on which the tower stands." The
individual images are not as significant as what they
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may signify as a creation of a relation within the mind
of who experiences their transformative connectedness.
Thus, in the following stanza of canto three, Stevens
introduces a person, an old man, to the scene and
places him within the movement of images the poet has
imagined. In the center of Stevens' "centre"
It is the old man standing on the tower.
Who reads no book. His ruddy ancientness
Absorbs the ruddy summer and is appeased,
By an understanding that fulfills his age.
By a feeling capable of nothing more (CP 374)
The two stanzas preceding this one point to a
specific apex, "green's green apogee," not simply
represented by the physical image of the mountain as "a
point of survey" and "axis of everything, " but also as
a place for the possibility of heightened human
awareness of the physical world in the imagination.
The apogee Stevens initially identifies as "the final
mountain" is, in effect, given its own apogee, that of
the old man who stands not in but on the tower and does
nothing but absorb the scene which is presented
before/beneath/among/around him. He is "appeased" or
satisfied in what Stevens calls "an understanding that
fulfills his age" so that he experiences an
understanding of his natural absorption into the
physicality and movement of presence in which he
resides and the satisfaction which this brings.
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Cantos IV and V reflect and comment on what the
previous three cantos have established. They are, in a
sense, a recapitulation of the philosophy of the poem,
a reiteration of its major premise that, borrowing the
title of another Stevens poem, "Reality is an Activity
of the Most August Imagination" (OP 135) . For Stevens,
the most august imagination enables the poet to "see"
things without being limited by sight, to hear without
sound, to know beyond the limitations of knowledge; it
is to see the world in the manner in which Stevens' old
man sees it, with an understanding that fulfills one's
age, feeling capable of nothing more. As Stevens
writes in canto IV:
It is
A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.
There the distant fails the clairvoyant eye
And the secondary senses of the ear
Swarm, not with secondary sounds, but choirs.
Not evocations but last choirs, last sounds
With nothing else compounded, carried full.
Pure rhetoric of a language without words.
Things stop in that direction and since they stop
The direction stops and we accept what is
As good. The utmost must be good and is
And is our fortune and honey hived in the trees
And mingling of colors at a festival (CP 374) .
Stevens presses us toward the completion of the
world in a summer vision of "the final mountain, " "the
rock of summer, " but this is a completion which is not
so much made as desired. The naturally changing
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evolutions of presence, not just manifested by the
physicality of objects in the world but also by
evocations of sound, distances of vision, and meaning
without words, all combine to create a kind of
directional flow to the reality of the scene created.
One's acceptance of this movement, I believe, signifies
an acceptance of the play of imagination in reality;
and as Stevens says "Things stop in that direction and
since they stop / The direction stops and we accept
what is / As good" (CP 374). In a sense, the
individual's understanding of the virtual workings of
reality seems to rest not only on one's acceptance of
its manifestations of completion (the acceptance of
what is as good) but also on one's ability identify
with the movements of reality toward the achievement of
a completed scene or a complete perception of the
scene.
Stevens' world of reality is, as canto V
promulgates, a world of integration. The comprehensive
and representative "One" is emphasized in canto V,
however as Helen Vendler has pointed out, it signifies
the entrance of the analytical mind and thus changes
the tone of the poem from description to investigation
(On Extended Wings 235). Thus, according to Vendler,
integration thus becomes interrogation, as the poem
continues:
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One day enriches a year. One woman makes
The rest look down. One man becomes a race.
Lofty like him, like him perpetual.
Or do the other days enrich the one?
And is the queen humble as she seems to be.
The charitable majesty of her whole kin? (CP
374) .
In the formation of yet another "centre, " the
questions Stevens presents in canto V— the only
questions present in the poem— come at the center of
the poem and actually disrupt the order and certainty
for which it strives. Vendler is correct in stating
that "The [poem does] not fail, but the human effort to
rest in the present is predestined to collapse, at
least for Stevens, who never was a poet formed to chant
in orgy to the summer sun" (On Extended Wings 236) .
Thus, at this exact physical center of Stevens' poem, a
place where one would expect the poet to achieve the
greatest level of certainty and clarity of vision
through the freedom of merging with the surrounding
scene's already established "centres," Stevens
inability to completely resolve and understand the
center ("centre") of things is foreshadowed.
In canto VI Stevens' brings back the presence of
the "final mountain" and thus returns to the certainty
and truth this image signifies. As a kind of
teleological image, or image of finality, Stevens'
mountain indeed looms large in its defining
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significance, however its presence is most fittingly-
revealed in approximations and half-lights. Although
the physicality of the mountain cannot be separated
("The rock cannot be broken. It is the truth."), it
may be interpreted as something divided, as "a mountain
half way green, and then / The other immeasurable half,
such rock as placid air becomes." The certainty of
definition ("It is . . . ") is countered and balanced
by variances of interpretation, so that the image of
the mountain is neither completely defined or
interpreted, but rather suspended as "such rock / As
placid air becomes." Stevens writes:
The rock cannot be broken. It is the truth.
It rises from land and sea and covers them.
It is a mountain half way green, and then,
The other immeasurable half, such rock
As placid air becomes. But it is not
A hermit's truth nor symbol in hermitage.
It is the visible rock, the audible,
The brilliant mercy of a sure repose.
On this present ground, the vividest repose,
Things certain sustaining us in certainty.
It is the rock of summer, the extreme,
A mountain luminous half way in bloom
And then half way in the extremest light
Of sapphires flashing from the central sky,
As if twelve princes sat before a king (CP 375).
The questioning nature of Stevens' use of the word
"one" in canto V is replaced with the repetitive and
defining certainty of the words "It is" in canto VI.
However, even though Stevens chooses to define his
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scene here with phrases such as "It is the truth, * "It
is the rock of summer,* "It is the visible rock, the
audible, * all these defining moments find their place
and character in a point of balance and rejuvenation
which Stevens calls "The brilliant mercy of a sure
repose, / On this present ground, the vividest repose,
/ Things certain sustaining us in certainty." At this
point in the poem, the question becomes: Is Stevens'
vision of the reality of summer— and its images of
presence— as complete and certain as Stevens' language
represents it to be, or does the vision actually resign
itself to the idea of repose and thus establish a
balance between presence and absence, movement and
stasis, the known and unknown, sound and silence, idea
and object, the seen and unseen?
Although Stevens' declaration of the image of the
mountain is made in terms of certainty, it never
reaches a final position of certain presence. 1 More
appropriately, the image of the mountain represents the
idea that presence--"Things certain sustaining us in
certainty"— as viewed by the poet, is best understood
as a repose, that is, a dwelling of balance and poise.
Thus, viewed in the light of its signification as a
repose, Stevens' earlier declarations of truth and
finality ("It is") are changed much like a tune played
on a blue guitar ("Things as they are / Are changed
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upon the blue guitar" (CP 165)). This change is
manifested in "Credences of Summer" as a
counterbalancing to the claims to truth expressed in
the poem, so that a final interpretation of reality is
made increasingly difficult. Stevens presents this
difficulty through the singers he introduces in canto
VII:
Far in the woods they sang their unreal songs,
secure. It was difficult to sing in face
Of the object. The singers had to avert
themselves
Or else avert the object. Deep in the woods
They sang of summer in the common fields (CP
376) .
As part of Stevens' "personae of summer," the
singers begin to lead the poem to a new "centre" of
awareness. No longer is the world to be viewed in
terms of definition and objectification; Stevens'
singers' introduce to the poem the process of
interpretation through a kind of distancing and
repetition. The canto continues:
Three times the concentred self takes hold, three
times
The thrice concentred self, having possessed
The object, gripes it in savage scrutiny,
Once to make captive, once to subjugate
Or yield to subjugation, once to proclaim
The meaning of the capture, this hard prize.
Fully made, fully apparent, fully found (CP 367) .
Here the singers, "thrice concentred [selves],"
posses, subjugate, and proclaim the meaning of "this
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hard prize, " but the question remains as to exactly
what the singers have “fully found." What is the
object before them? Is it the final mountain, the rock
of summer, the truth, or is it the totality of presence
seen and felt as "the vividest repose" of reality?
If the poem gradually moves in the direction of
demonstrating reality through the imagination, after
having previously introduced the connection between
reality and presence as the "here" and "now, " then it
appears that the direction of "Credences" is indeed
toward a repose of some kind, a view of reality as
balancing between reality as "solid fact" and what the
poet wants fact to be. This imagination/reality
struggle in "Credences of Summer" is critical to the
poem, and this is, generally, the struggle in all of
Stevens' work.
The final three cantos of the poem announce, I
believe, the poet's acceptance of the images and ideas
of repose. From the imagery of capture, subjugation
and proclamation Stevens uses in canto VII, he quite
dramatically changes the tonality and philosophy of the
poem in canto VIII. Here Stevens' poem leaves the
"fully found" stability of the earth and enters a realm
of clouds, sky and spirit, all part of his vision of
summer. Canto VII begins with yet another kind of
announcement as
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The trumpet of morning blows in the clouds and
through
The sky. It is the visible announced.
It is the more than visible, the more
Than sharp, illustrious scene. The trumpet cries
This is the successor of the invisible.
This is its substitute in stratagems
Of the spirit. This, in sight an memory,
Must takes its place, as what is possible
Replaces what is not. The resounding cry
Is like ten thousand tumblers tumbling down (CP
376) .
What Stevens seems to make possible here is a
perception of reality beyond any determinations or
definitions of physicality. In the "elevation" of the
non-physical, what Stevens later refers to in this
canto as "the unreal, " the resounding cry of the
trumpet of morning, "like ten thousand tumblers
tumbling down," announces yet another new "centre" to
the poem— the imaginative mind of the poet:
The trumpet supposes that
A mind exists, aware of division, aware
Of its cry as clarion, its diction's way
As that of a personage in a multitude:
Man' s mind grown venerable in the unreal (CP
377) .
This is the final, lasting "centre" of centers in
"Credences." Man's connection to the unreal is, as the
poem states, "aware" of its significance within a
multitude of signifiers. The "mottled mood of summer's
whole" is composed of and centered in the mind of the
poet through a range of virtual signifiers which
demonstrate, ironically, the credence (certainty) of
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summer in terms of moods, movements, colors and
costumes. Stevens concludes the poem:
The personae of summer play the characters
Of an inhuman author, who meditates
With the gold bugs, in blue meadows, late at
night.
He does not hear his characters talk. He sees
Them mottled, in the moodiest costumes,
Of blue and yellow, sky and sun, belted
And knotted, sashed and seamed, half pales of
red.
Half pales of green, appropriate habit for
The huge decorum, the manner of the time.
Part of the mottled mood of summer's whole.
In which the characters speak because they want
To speak, the fat, roseate characters.
Free, for a moment, from malice and sudden cry.
Complete in a completed scene, speaking
Their parts as in a youthful happiness (CP 378).
Operating like a Ptolemaic chart of the universe—
concentric circles of varying levels of perception and
awareness— the conclusion of "Credences" expresses the
poet's need to wholly embrace (be embraced by) the
physical world but at the same time be wholly free of
it in moments of what Stevens calls an "unexplained
completion." The most real, final presence of the
poem, I believe, is the meditating mind of the poet,
who in the process of considering a rather vast range
of images--from the poem's initial grandeur of "the
natural tower of all the world" to its detailed
conclusion of "gold bugs, in blue meadows, late at
night"— demonstrates the power of the imagination over
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all things and every condition of experience. Sound
and silence, the visible and invisible, earth and sky,
human and inhuman, old and young, life and death are
all part of Stevens' poetic vision since they are all
vitally connected to the life of the poet. As Stevens
simply states in the "Adagia, " "It is life we are
trying to get at in poetry" (OF 185).
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Notes
1. Stevens' image of the "final mountain* in
"Credences of Summer" never achieves the significance
of "certain presence" in that it is always depicted or
described in its relation to other surrounding images,
personae and forces with which it comes into contact:
the sun, the air, the old man, the trees, the sky, the
trumpet of morning. Thus, the mountain signifies a
kind of central relational— not certain— image in the
poem and sustains Stevens' position that "Poetry is not
the same thing as the imagination taken alone. Nothing
is taken alone. Things are because of interrelations
or interactions" (OP 189).
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Works Cited
Altieri, Charles. "Why Stevens Must be Abstract, or
What a Poet Can Learn From Painting." Wallace
Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism, edited by
Albert Gelpi. Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore and
London: The Johns Hopkins University, 1976 .
Speech and Phenomena And Other
Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973.
Doggett, Frank. Wallace Stevens' Poetry of Thought.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966.
Filreis, Alan. "Still Life Without Substance: Wallace
Stevens and the Language of Agency." Poetics
Today, volume 10, no. 2. Summer 1989.
Kermode, Frank. Wallace Stevens. London: Faber- and
Faber, 1989.
LaGuardia, David. Advance on Chaos: The Sanctifying
Imagination of Wallace Stevens. Hanover, NH:
Brown University Press, 1983.
Litz, A. Walton. Introspective Voyager: The Poetic
Development of Wallace Stevens. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1972.
McCann, Janet. Wallace Stevens Revisited: "The
Celestial Possible." New York: Twayne Publishers,
1995.
Poirier, Richard. The Literature of Renewal. New
York: Random House, 1987.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace
Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.
Letters of Wallace Stevens. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.
----------------. The Necessary Angel: Essays on
Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage
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Books, 1951.
Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays,
Prose. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Vendler, Helen. Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of
Desire. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee
Press, 1984.
On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens'
Longer Poems. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1969.
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In so far as a man or woman is susceptible to poiesis,
to meaning made form, he or she is open to incursions
and appropriations of delight or of sadness, of
assurance or of dread, of enlightenment or of
perplexity, whose modes of operation are, finally,
beyond paraphrase.
George Steiner, Real Presences
The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only when
he speaks somewhat wildly, or "with the flower of the
mind"; not when the intellect used as an organ, but
with the intellect released from all service and
suffered to take its direction from its celestial life.
Emerson, "The Poet"
CHAPTER FOUR
"THIS IS NOTHING UNTIL IN A SINGLE MAN CONTAINED" :
STEVENS' MOMENT OF POETRY IN SEVEN POEMS
In his essay "The Poet," Emerson writes of a
particular quality or "value" in literature he finds
most significant. It is no surprise to discover that
the basis of his critical perspective lies in a quality
or characteristic suggestive not of a particular
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subject or meaning the text might pursue, but rather in
terms of the text potentiality to convey an experience
of mind beyond the structures of subject and meaning,
and thus approach a level of engagement with the text
which he calls "transcendental and extraordinary."
Emerson writes:
I think nothing is of any value in books
excepting the transcendental and extraordinary.
If a man is inflamed and carried away by his
thought, to that degree that he forgets the
authors and the public and heeds only this one
dream which holds him like an insanity, let me
read his paper, and you may have all the
arguments and histories and criticism (243).
As a critical perspective of literary possession,
Emerson's focus is clearly directed on "something as
vague and fantastic as a dream" (242), which is the
directed perception and thought of the artist involved
in the act of being possessed by, as well as coming
into possession of the cosmos (Poirier 67). Rather
than view this sort of possession as a moment of
stasis, a frozen instance of clarity of vision and
understanding of the transcendental and transitory,
Emerson's notion that to be held in the "insanity" of
the text suggests that the experience is to be held in
a movement of thought, in the process of discovery and
becoming which is precisely the manner in which
transcendental and transitory images promulgate their
existence. For Emerson, as well as for Stevens, it is
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in the transitory images and ideas of a text that a
sense— a view— of the transcendental is reflected; it
is precisely in this wonderful paradox of selflessness
and timelessness when the poet is called and poetry
finds its vatic occasion and appears.
As stated earlier, Wallace Stevens' creative
process may be described in terms of a three-fold
movement of meditation, contemplation and enactment.
The result (not "conclusion") of this process is, of
course, the enactment of poetry in the language and
style of the poem, however the process of Stevens
"theoria" and the poem itself are not completely
separate from one another. Stevens' most fundamental
directive (or better, "quality" or "essence") for
poetry seems to be articulated through his own
"theoria," that is, the meditation, contemplation and
enactment of poetry in poetry. Stevens' renderings are
governed by an element, a sense, a feeling, a quality
of tone, a perception or vision, a fear, a desire, a
nobility (Stevens) a genius (Emerson) , an ambiguity, a
relationship or resemblance, an inexplicable
identification with revelation within the familiarity
of experience. Stevens' moment of poetry, then,
corresponds to an anticipation and simulacrum of the
transcendental in the transitory moments of awareness
(meditation) , in the expression of a particular point
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of vision, color, light, movement, tone, sound, sense
or feeling (contemplation) which for him becomes the
poem (enactment) .1
It is indeed fitting that Stevens' "moment of
poetry" is often represented by a "momentary" vision or
thought, that transitory quality of experience Emerson
connects to the text's expression of something larger
and more eternal. Emerson states at the beginning of
"The Over-Soul" that:
There is a difference between one and another
hour of life in their authority and subsequent
effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is
habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief
moments which constrains us to ascribe more
reality to them than to all other experiences
(206).
For Emerson, as well as for Stevens, "the universe
may be represented in an atom, in a moment of time"
(223), and thus the worlds Emerson and Stevens create
for themselves are not the constructed fragmentations
of thoughts or events. Rather, Emerson writes of the
Over-Soul as "that Unity" (207), "that common heart"
(207) which resides "within man [as] the soul of the
whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which
every part and particle is equally related; the eternal
One" (207) . Similarly, Stevens writes in "The Final
Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour" of "a whole / A
knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous" (CP 524)
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as a meditative unification of mind and matter. And
yet this unification of momentary experience is more
than a merging of mind and matter or thought and event,
it may in fact signify the basis of all Emersonian and
Stevensian visionary thought. As Emerson states:
And this deep power in which we exist and whose
beatitude is all accessible to us is not only
self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the
act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and
the spectacle, the subject and the object, are
one (207).
Here Emerson' focuses on the transformative forces of
perception and possibility as fundamental to the
existence and being of every individual. Just as
Stevens' man with the blue guitar discovered that
through the imagination "Things as they are / Are
changed upon the blue guitar" (CP 165), Emerson
recognizes the potential of familiar objects to take on
the light of heaven, and thus reflect the condition of
their spiritual, eternal possibility of existence. He
writes in one of his journals:
This power of imagination, the making of some
familiar object, as fire or rain, or a bucket, or
shovel do new duty as an exponent of some truth
or general law, bewitches and delights men. It
is a taking of dead sticks, and clothing about
with immortality; it is music out of creaking and
scouring. All opaque things are transparent, and
the light of heaven struggles through (The
Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson 211-IQ).
Since Stevens' poems seem to exist in Emerson's
described space of perception where the familiar and
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temporal objects of lived experience are merged with
the possibility of transparency of transcendence, his
poetry generally promulgates a mood or quality of mind
(rather than the representation of static images of a
reductive reality) as the centralizing force of the
poem. As he writes in "An Ordinary Evening in New
Haven,* the artificer or poet "measures the velocities
of change" (CP 414)
In flights of eye and ear, the highest eye
And the lowest ear, the deep ear that discerns,
At evening, things that attend it until it hears
The supernatural preludes of its own,
At the moment when the angelic eye defines
Its actors approaching, in company, in their
masks (CP 414) .
This is not to say that Stevens' poetic images and
ideas always manage to resolve themselves into an
ordered series of meaningful vibrations, but rather as
a whole Stevens seems to elevate, as images and ideas
of the poem dissolve into air, a tone, a mood of
perception or the possibility which sustains the entire
poem.
As examples of Stevens' moment of poetry, I will
look at one poem from each of his seven books of
poetry. The poems are "The Plot Against the Giant"
(Harmonium) , "Re-Statement of Romance" (Ideas of
Order) , "The Men That Are Falling" (The Man With the
Blue Guitar) , "The Well Dressed Man with a Beard"
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(Parts of a World), "The Red Fern" (Transport to
Summer) , "Large Red Man Reading" (The Auroras of
Autumn) , and "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing
Itself" (The Rock). 2
"The Plot Against the Giant"
In an early journal entry of 1904, Stevens writes
of his vision of the external world and the enormity of
the "giant" man must constantly face:
Man is an affair of cites. His gardens +
orchards + fields are mere scrapings. Somehow,
however, he has managed to shut out the face of
the giant from his windows. But the giant is
there, nevertheless. And it is a proper
question, whether or not the Lilliputians have
tied him down. There are his huge legs, Africa +
South America, still, apparently, free; and the
rest of him is pretty tough and unhandy (Letters
73) .
The "giant" Stevens refers to here signifies the
Earth; in the same journal entry of 1904 Stevens
writes: "There are but a few who consider [the Earth's]
physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a
disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes + barrens +
wilds. It still dwarfs + terrifies + crushes. The
rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds
still chatter " (Letters 73) . For Stevens, the
qualities and characteristics of perpetual movement and
change which the Earth naturally reveals to humanity--
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its solitudes, barrens and wilds, as well as its power
to manifest itself as a prodigious and portentous
force— is what makes the Earth, like poetry, more of a
force than a presence. The forces which the Earth
manifests in turn create a human interpretation of
these forces in the form of a construction of a
particular reality. What Stevens describes in his
journal entry of 1904 may be his construction and
interpretation of a dominant and deterministic reality
which his own particular perspective of the Earth, in
its constancy of fluctuation, instills in him.
By the time Stevens writes "The Plot Against the
Giant" in 1915, the giant as the earth has been
anthropomorphized into an ominous figure of human
reality, a maundering yokel whetting his hacker. The
giant here comes to represent the embodiment of a
dominant view of reality which is inarticulate and
uncivilized, and thus presents a serious challenge to the
possibility of refiguring this perspective of reality
through the imagination. Stevens writes in the "Adagia"
that "The earth is not a building but a body" (OP 186) ,
and it is the body of the giant which the three girls
initially confront in the poem. However, in order to
disengage the reality before them, the three girls must
challenge the vision and sensibility of the giant by
offering their individual imaginative enticements.
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First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering.
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him.
Diffusing the civilist odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.
Second Girl
I shall run before him.
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.
Third Girl
Oh, la ... la pauvre!
I shall run before him.
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutterals.
It will undo him (CP 6).
As a poetic series of momentary experience
explored through the process of confrontation and
challenge, the figure of the giant is "undone" not
simply by the offerings of odor and color by the first
two girls, but rather by a moment of poetry, an aural
moment of language enacting and completing a
perspective of a new scene, a new reality. In this
sense, the language of the third girl does not simply
act as the final deconstructor ("It will undo him") of
the giant's primitive perspective of reality, but
rather it refigures and completes a new reality which
is made manifest in the fully formed language of
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poetry. And although the reader might easily assume
that the French phrase which the Third Girl offers is
completely incomprehensible to the giant, the language
still manages to operate as a kind of completion. As
Marie Boroff writes of the poem: "the change from
guttural to labial and apical sounds is like the
finishing off of articulation, the rendering of half-
formed into fully formed speech" (915-21). In this
sense, the poem marks not just an evolution and
completion of a particular language, but an evolution
of language and community in the form of poetry. For
Stevens, the linguistic turn from gutterals to labials
ultimately signifies a turn in the human community's
view of reality as something governed by the
mysteriousness of sensory images and the feelings these
create. What I have identified as the linguistic turn
in Stevens' poem takes on much greater significance
viewed in light of its connection to the idea of the
poet as "a civilizational agent, a maker of the social
order of the human community . . . who intends to bring
to pass the wealth the structure of the human
world . . . which is founded in and reproduced
through . . . the structure of the song" (Grossman,
"Orpheus/Philomela: Subjection and Mastery in the
Founding Stories of Poetic Production and in the Logic
of Our Practice," 231). The function of the third girl
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is indeed significant as she effectively is the
"civilizational agent" of the poem, and, with her song,
remakes the social order and civilizes the world
through the sound of words.
As a moment of poetry, "The Plot Against the
Giant" initially places the reader at the center of a
conception of reality governed by a sound-sense of
incoherent faltering; however, this center is quickly
given a meaningful voice through the language of a
completely new view of reality in terms of the
"Heavenly labials" of the third girl's song. And
although Stevens concludes the poem without a clear
resolution to his own "plot," the poem operates as a
necessary restatement of reality, a reimagining of the
giant's silent world into an understanding of reality
in the "languages" of those (the three girls) who are
able to view the world through the particularity of
their own individual imaginations. Here, in the
imaginative world of the girls which the giant
confronts, even threatens the enormity of the world is
reduced to a few central objects ("geraniums and
unsmelled flowers," cloths besprinkled with colors")
and one moment of vatic whispering. This final vatic
act of the poem which the Third Girl performs, marks, I
believe, the poem's progression from a space of
materiality and temporality to one of transparency, and
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thus elevates the poem to a condition of
transmogrification Stevens' sought for all of his
poetry, whereby familiar objects, ideas and experiences
are made unfamiliar and thus elevated beyond their
initial status and condition of familiarity.
In "Two or Three Ideas, * Stevens describes the
following condition for poetry:
All old dwelling-places are subject to . . .
transmogrifications and the experience of all of
us includes a succession of old dwelling-places:
abodes of the imagination, ancestral or memories
of places that never existed. It is plain that
when, in this world of weak feeling and blank
thinking, in which we are face to face with the
poem every moment of time, we encounter some
integration of the poem that pierces and dazzles
us, the effect is an effect of style and not of
the poem itself or at least not of the poem alone
(OP 258) .
What Stevens asserts here as the poem having its
own meaningful dwelling-place not in the claims or
statements of the poem, but in the style it manifests
as an effect of feeling, seems to correspond to the
notion that Stevens' moment of poetry may have more to
do with a non-verbal moment before the actual words of
the poem arise. Allen Grossman has stated in The
Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Reader and
Writers that
To bring speech out of silence there must be an
occasion generative of speech. The "occasion
generative of speech" is some dislocation or
"disease" of the relationship of a subject and an
object .... Creation is not the speaking
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itself but the primordial disease or fall which
thrusts me into a predicament in which speech is
the only way (218).
The notion of dislocation and predicament Grossman
writes of is, I believe, the process and predicament of
Stevens' "The Plot Against the Giant." Speech is the
only way to address the dislocation of subject and
object, and thus the poem's third and final stanza
falls into this predicament of speech. However, this
fall, for Grossman, is the creation-moment (the moment
of poetry) whereby perception may be sustained only
through a language which attempts to fully capture the
grandeur of the perception. As Stevens recognizes in
"Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself," the
creation-moment anticipates the poem and is often
articulated in the sound of "that scrawny cry— it was /
A chorister whose c preceded the choir" (534).
Kathleen Raine, in her book The Inner Journey of the
Poet points out that "while the reader naturally . . .
begins with the words on the page; the poet [begins]
with an idea which does not yet exist in words but
which does exist as an idea, a mood, an intuition; even
as a wordless form, somewhat like music" (17-18). John
Dewey, in citing a passage from Schiller, provides
further testimony as to the poet's experience of this
particular "musical mood of mind." Dewey writes:
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Speaking on the origin of his poems, Schiller
said: "With me the perception is first without a
clear and definite object. This takes shape
later. What precedes is a peculiar musical mood
of mind. Afterwards comes the poetical idea." I
interpret this saying to mean something of the
kind just stated. Moreover, not only does the
"mood" come first, but it persists as the
substratum after distinctions emerge; in fact,
they emerge as its distinction (191-192).
Stevens' linguistic or musical moment of poetry in
poetry signifies, then, a kind of visionary movement
from a realm of temporal-spatial reality (things as
they are) to the possibility of transcendency
articulated in the language of transcendency: whispered
"Heavenly labials in a world of gutterals" (CP 7) . The
effect of this movement, this hope for change, is that
it gives value to the imagination in reality not just
in terms of its force and function in poetry, but as a
spiritual and intellectual aspect of life, for the
benefit of the entire human community.
As Stevens writes in "Imagination as Value": "[The
imagination] is part of our security. It enables us to
live our own lives. We have it because we do not have
enough without it" (NA 150). In this respect, Stevens'
moment of poetry is also a moment of the imagination
manifesting itself in reality and providing the poet
(as well as readers or listeners of poetry) with a
sustaining foundation of thought. George Steiner
writes in Language and Silence: Essays on Language,
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Literature and the Inhuman that the poem's "free play
of musical form" both corresponds to the singularity of
the creator as well as the renewal of the
reader/listener. For Steiner,
By a gradual loosing or transcendence of its
forms, the poem strives to escape from the
linear, denotative, logically determined bonds of
linguistic syntax into what the poet takes to be
the simultaneities, immediacies, and the free
play of musical form. It is in music that the
poet hopes to find the paradox resolved of an act
of creation singular to the creator, bearing the
shapes of his own spirit, yet indefinitely
renewed in each listener (43).
The position Steiner takes here— for poetry to
move from the "determined bonds of linguistic syntax"
to a singular creative act which represents "the shapes
of [the poet's] own spirit "--is an apt description of
the progress and process of Stevens' "The Plot Against
the Giant." The third girl, who acts as the poet
within the poem, makes renewal possible, and thus
manages to transform, in just a few whispered words, a
once dumb and deterministic perspective of the world
into a kind of mysterious, powerful, immediate music of
singular creation.
"Re-Statement of Romance"
From Stevens' next book of poems. Ideas of Order,
"Re-Statement of Romance" continues the directive of
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Harmonium that poetry concern itself with a particular
level/aspect of perception which may be achieved in the
unification of imagination and reality. As Stevens
writes in the "Adagia": "Perhaps there is a degree of
perception at which what is real and what is imagined
are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible
or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest
poet" (OP 192). What Stevens' "acutest poet"
experiences in the end is his own mind reflecting on
life for so long that [his] thought . . . becomes an
inseparable part of [life] or a particular aspect of
life so intensely felt that the feeling has entered
into it" (NA 65) . The vital experience of this
integration signifies Stevens' occasion for poetry. In
his essay "The Figure of the Youth as a Virile Poet, *
Stevens writes:
It is easy to suppose that few people realize on
this occasion, which comes to all of us, when we
look at the blue sky for the first time, that is
to say: not merely to see it, but look at it and
experience it and for the first time have a sense
that we live in the center of a physical poetry,
a geography that would be intolerable except for
the non-geography that exists there— few people
realize that they are looking at the world of
their own thoughts and the world of their own
feelings. On that occasion, the blue sky is a
particular of life that we have thought of often,
even though unconsciously, and that we have felt
intensely in those crystallizations of freshness
that we no more remember than we remember this or
that gust of wind in spring or autumn (NA 65-66) .
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Although Stevens here uses the example of one's
experience of the blue sky, the experience of night
which "Re-Statement of Romance" addresses also marks an
occasion in which one senses that we indeed "live in
the center of a physical poetry." In a reversal of
William Carlos Williams' famous phrase, "No ideas but
in things," Stevens proposes that things exist as they
are— as ideas in the mind of the seer. Questions
regarding the perplexity of perception essentially lead
Stevens to ultimately question the threshold of Being,
that point of "clairvoyant observation" when things are
seen "with the hottest fire of sight" (CP 373) and in
terms of their quality of "essential barrenness" (CP
373) . As Stevens writes in "An Ordinary Evening in New
Haven," this barrenness is not part of something
lacking, a void in the perception of thought, rather it
becomes a kind of evidence and opening of thought:
The barrenness that appears is an exposing.
It is not part of what is absent, a halt
For farewells, a sad hanging on for remembrances.
It is a coming on and a coming forth (CP 487) .
To "live at the center of a physical poetry, a
geography that would be intolerable except for the non
geography that exists there" {NA 65) , is to be acutely
perceptive of one's relationship to and experience of
the phenomenal world as a "coming forth" of existence
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(Being) within the individual who lives at the center
of this physical poetry. In this respect, Stevens'
poetry of the experience of sun, night, sky, sea,
summer and winter are also expressions of the
experience of a particular sense of Being which "is not
a being but, rather, that informing elan or power"
(Scott, Jr. 32) which dictates and distinguishes one's
individual existence.
As a good example of the Stevensian poetic
continuum from perception to barrenness or from being
to an informing elan or power, "Re-Statement of
Romance" quietly places the reader/listener in the
center of a physical poetry governed by an underlying
"impersonal force, a blossoming, a flowering of the
energies of life itself" (Oates 5). This underlying
elan or power of being may be characterized as a
quality of perception achieved without the imposition
of reasoned thought, that is, thought directed by
logic and conclusion-seeking argument. As William
Bevis states, Stevens' "final sense is [often] a
metaphor suggesting perception in a state of no-mind"
(155), and it is this kind of "clarity of suchness and
the calm unity of no-mind" (Bevis 155) which I believe
best describes Stevens' moment of poetry in "Re
statement of Romance":
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The night knows nothing of the chants of the
night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself
And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,
Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes.
That night is only the background of our selves.
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws
(CP 146).
As a "re-statement, " the poem may be viewed as a
reiteration or clarification of a preceding statement
of romance. In this interpretative light, the
published poem (re-statement) acts as a sort of
palimpsest--a text written on the faded page of a
previously written text (statement)— and thus may
signify an enlargement or extension of what was
spoken/written earlier. Moreover, Stevens' idea that
poetry functions as "one of the enlargements of life"
(NA viii) may also be noticed in the fact that the poem
is labeled a "romance." "Romance," in the sense
Stevens uses it here, connotes an "enlargement" as a
mysterious or fascinating quality or appeal for
something, and thus "Re-Statement of Romance" becomes,
a re-statement of the mysterious and ineffable quality
of poetic perception.
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Although Stevens' title seems to imply a quest for
one kind interpretive clarity (as a re-statement) , the
poem actually manages to suggest meaning through a form
of perception— of clarity— made possible in the acts of
individual observation and placing. As an enlargement
and re-statement of poetry, Stevens' poem seems not
only to represent the mind of the poet (writer) , but it
also anticipates the function of the critic (reader)
who, according to F.R. Leavis, ideally "proceeds with
an attention which is close and stringent, yet also
provisional, and at all times susceptible to
revaluation" (Steiner 222).
"Re-Statement of Romance" is particularly
susceptible to revaluation since the declarations made
in the poem turn out to be the representations of
various references of perspective--parallaxes--rather
than attempted statements of truth. While on the one
hand Stevens presents readers with a world where it is
enough to know "It is what it is as I am what I am: /
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself / And
you" (CP 146), this declaration, like all the
declarations made in the poem, are subject to a
subsequent number of "conceptual and figurative
interchanges, substitutions [and] displacements"
(Miller, 153) . Moreover, as the poem progresses, the
initial ontological grounding of the poem ("I am what I
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am") becomes increasingly groundless as the interchange
of the two individuals (man and woman, poet and muse)
gradually dissolve into the background of night:
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,
That night is the only background of our selves.
Supremely true to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws
(CP 146)
Once the declaration of "I am" is made, Stevens
arranges his poem by placing an exterior condition of
scene ("The night knows nothing of the chants of the
night") in relationship to the individual's condition
of mind/self. Things are (dis)placed in the scene as
they are (dis)placed in the mind, so that the poem
evolves, albeit in its own quality of bareness, as a
reflection of the various conditions and relationships
of separateness which are generated. The declarative
and mindful "I am" then gives way to a kind of
solitary, mindless and disconnected self which can only
exist against the background of night. As J. Hillis
Miller writes in The Linguistic Moment, the self that
Stevens creates exists much in the same way his figures
and images often exist— as unfounded and fragile.
Miller writes that "The self exists, but in the same
fragile and groundless way as fruit, sun, poem, and
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geometrical diagram. It exists as icon, as image, as
figure of the underlying nothing" (413) .
Miller's statement may be true to some degree;
however, in "Re-Statement of Romance" the last line of
the poem seems to operate as yet a final displacement
of "the underlying nothingness" within the poem, and
thus comes to signify a moment of final clarity of
perception and understanding of self not as a "figure
of underlying nothingness" but as a kind of productive
and illumined co-existence. Indeed, nothing is
actually accomplished— as action— in the poem until the
final moment of noticing takes place and the two
individuals of the poem come to the realization that
Night is only the background of our selves.
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws
(CP 146) .
For Stevens, action is secondary to how the
condition of the scene, as it exists and unfolds in the
minds of those experiencing the scene, enables the
condition of one's initial existence of bareness to be
transformed itself into a shared source of light. Yet,
while the lovers Stevens writes about in "The Final
Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour" experience "a
light, a power, the miraculous influence" (CP 524) , the
two lovers here not only embody and enact this same
light, power and miraculous influence, they offer it to
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one another as a symbol and source of their co
existence, and thus the poem's initial sense of
separation creates a movement of harmony "In the pale
light that each upon the other throws" (CP 146) .
Stevens' moment of poetry in "Re-Statement of
Romance" is reflected in a moment of merely existing,
without reservation or evasion, within a moment of
light which, in a poem (and represented world) of
darkness and separateness, enlarges the condition of
the individual's existence. This enlargement is
attained, I believe, by the parallatic interchanges and
displacements of perception the two individuals undergo
throughout the poem. As Stevens writes in a letter to
Hi Simons:
When I was a boy I used to think that things
progressed by contrasts, that there was a law of
contrasts. But this was building the world out
of blocks. Afterwards, I came to think more of
the energizing that comes from mere interplay,
interaction. Thus, the various faculties of the
mind co-exist and interact, and there is as much
delight in this mere co-existence as a man and a
woman find in each other's company. This is a
rather crude illustration, but it makes the
point. Cross-reflections, modifications,
counter-balances, complements, giving and taking
are illimitable {Letters 368) .
Thus, the moment of poetry for Stevens appears once
all determining influences of body, mind, being and
scene are effectively erased in the eternal and
energizing co-existence of self-made light. That
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ineffable, illimitable and Orphic moment of the
convergence of the image's disappearance and its
appearance as energy and life and light Stevens often
seeks in his work. 3 As Mallarme states in Dieux
antiques, "Orpheus is the sunset and the sunrise: those
moments when the sun just touches the principle of
darkness" (McGahey xxi); it is at this precise and
subtle moment of counter-balance and cross-reflection
(sunset and sunrise) when interplay and interaction lead
to an energized space and the poet discovers, at last,
the poetry of the poem.
"The Men That Are Falling"
God and all angels sing the world to sleep.
Now that the moon is rising in the heat
And crickets are loud again in the grass. The
moon
Bums in the mind on lost remembrances.
He lies down and the night wind blows upon him
here.
The bells grow longer. This is not sleep. This
is
desire.
Ah! Yes, desire . . . this leaning on his bed,
Staring, at midnight, at the pillow that is black
In the catastrophic room . . . beyond despair.
Like an intenser instinct. What is it he
desires?
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But this he cannot know, the man that thinks,
Yet life itself, the fulfillment of desire
In the grinding ric-rac, staring steadily
At a head upon the pillow in the dark.
More than sudarium, speaking the speech
Of absolutes, bodiless, a head
Thick-lipped from riot and rebellious cries.
The head of one of the men that are falling,
placed
Upon the pillow to repose and speak.
Speak and say the immaculate syllables
That he spoke only by doing what he did.
God and all angels, this was his desire.
Whose head lies blurring here, for this he died.
Taste of the blood upon his martyred lips,
0 pensioners, 0 demagogues and pay-men!
This death was his belief though death is a
stone.
This man loved earth, not heaven, enough to die.
The night wind blows upon the dreamer, bent
Over words that are life's voluble utterance (CP
187-88).
In a review of The Man with the Blue Guitar for
The New Republic, William Carlos Williams writes that
Stevens' "The Men That Are Falling" is
the most passionate and altogether the best work
in the selection— one of the best poems of the
day. Here Stevens has shown himself the man, the
artist in all the profundity of his aroused
sensibilities, no longer fiddling with thoughts
but embodying thought in an adult thrust with all
his mature weight behind it (174-5) .
While Williams quickly praises Stevens' ability to
" [embody] thought in an adult thrust, " he does not
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provide, in this brief review, adequate reasoning or
clarification as to how the poem demonstrates this new
act of poetic maturity and forcefulness. Uncovering
evidence of poetic passion, sensibility and maturity is
indeed a difficult task for any reader, since each poem
manifests these conditions in a particular manner
appropriate to the style of the poem. However, in the
case of "The Men That Are Falling, * Stevens finds a
suitable "Stevensian" approach to the conditions of the
scene he writes about. That is, the sociological,
political position Stevens takes in "The Men That Are
Falling" follows his own consistently adamant view that
poetry not directly concern itself with any political
or sociological issues. As he writes in "The Noble
Rider and the Sound of Words":
Yes: the all-commanding subject-matter of poetry
is life, the never-ceasing source. But it is not
a social obligation. One does not love and go
back to one's ancient mother as a social
obligation. One goes back out of a suasion not
to be denied (NA 28).
Given his prose statement, as well as the many
demonstrations of this statement in verse, Stevens had
come to be generally known as "the Stevens of "Sea
Surface Full of Clouds," the poet (and the very poem)
Ransom relished as having 'no moral, political,
religious or sociological values'" (Filreis 244).
Nevertheless, according to Mark Halliday in Stevens and
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the Interpersonal, "Stevens feels an impulse [in "The
Men That Are Falling"] to praise the republicans in the
Spanish Civil War, but his entire sensibility resists
the moral implications that would follow from such
praise" (144) . Beyond the moral implications of
Stevens' position, it also seems significant that such
praise, regardless of his partisanship would "find
Stevens attempting to exorcise these private tensions
by resorting to a solution in the social order"
(Vendler, 20) , which, as Helen Vendler points out, is
quite uncharacteristic for Stevens. She writes that
"As [Stevens] begins to see depression as a social,
rather than a personal, emotion, he thinks it may be
ended by social cohesion rather than by interior
resolution" (20) . Stevens' more familiar place for the
working out of any political or sociological issues
reality typically takes place within a poetry having to
do with the "psychic problems of private misery and the
relation of that misery to both art and nature"
(Vendler 21) . This "inner position" of course turns
the symbolic focus of the poem to the perceptions and
beliefs (Stevens' word in the poem is "desire") of the
poet/seer and not to the secondary or outward
projections of an imagined "head upon the pillow in the
dark" signifying a particular social, political or
moral ideology.
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The "inner position" of Stevens poem, and its
particular quality of consciousness manages to rather
easily transcend the surrounding pressure of any
particular social, political or moral reality. A much
more profound and personal desire for an altogether
different reality is manifested in the poem as a moment
of self- consciousness, what Georges Poulet calls
Cognito. As J. Hillis Miller writes in Theory now and
then, Poulet
puts great value on defining the Cognito of each
writer. The Cognito is the primary moment of the
revelation of the self to itself in 'an act of
self-consciousness' separating the mind from
everything which may enter it from the outside
(PAGE).
Stevens' poetry as a meditation, contemplation and
enactment of transition, transparency and transcendence
seems to direct "The Men That are Falling" to a wholly
interiorized, self-aware view (a Cognito) of the world
and reminds us that such a view serves as the general
center of Stevens' poetic perceptions.
"The poem begins wonderfully, in private loss, as
the moon 'burns in the mind on lost remembrances'"
(Vendler 20) and the poet contemplates
This leaning on his elbows on his bed.
Staring, at midnight, at the pillow that is black
In the catastrophic room . . . beyond despair,
Like an intenser instinct. What is it he
desires? (CP 187-188).
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However, it is at the moment of asking this
question that the poem turns from the privacy of the
poet's internal contemplation of desire to the "Thick-
lipped from riot and rebellious cries" of "The head of
one of the men that are falling." Stevens allows the
figure of the head to "Speak and say the immaculate
syllables" of "life's voluble utterance," however in
"turning the acts of the soldiers into a form of
utterance ["That he spoke only by doing what he did"]
he suggests that his own immaculate syllables spring as
well from a form of death, symbolized by the absence of
the inamorata on the pillow" (Vendler 20) . The effect
of this translation of act to utterance is that Stevens
forwards the continuum of self-awareness and desire
from the beginning of the poem and its images of sleep
(a kind of temporary death) to the final death of one
of the men that falling.
"The Well Dressed Man with a Beard"
"The Well Dressed Man with a Beard" signifies a
rather typical Stevensian device to expand or enlarge
the idea of poetry through a reduction of all things
into one image, idea or moment of a representative
totality. Although it seems rather paradoxical to
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suggest that the idea of poetry may be enlarged by an
act (enactment) of poetic reduction, recall Stevens'
statement in the "Adagia" in which he claims that
"Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in
comparison to imagination applied to a detail" (OP
200) . It is the particularity of a detail which
Stevens often focuses on, and it is through this focus
that he attempts to, in effect, "reduce" the world into
one thing, image or idea. However, for Stevens, this
is not an act of reduction in the sense that he merely
depicts a central thing, image or idea in isolation to
surrounding things, images and ideas. That is,
reduction is not interpreted as a decline or limitation
of perspective. For Stevens, the world is not simply
represented by, as for example in "Of Modem Poetry, "
an image of "a man skating, a woman dancing a woman
combing (CP 240) , but in terms of how an image can
enlarge one's sense about the world as sound, thought,
emotion, color, motion, interaction, meditation and
satisfaction. In the end, the actuality of Stevens'
images seem to dissolve so that they may more
significantly exist "in the idea of the thing" (CP
247), that is, as a "thing believed, a thing affirmed"
(CP 247) . "The Well Dressed Man with a Beard" begins on
the level of affirmation:
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After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is the present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one.
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket's horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a pretty phrase.
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house . . .
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never
(CP 247) .
Joseph Carroll points out in Wallace Stevens'
Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism that "The Well
Dressed Man with a Beard" is an example of Stevens'
reduction of things into a representative moment
arising out of "the clash of yes and no" (141) . For
Carroll, Stevens' quest for the "one thing that was
firm" is never fully realized and sustained in itself
to become a total and "complete" affirmation of the
"One thing remaining, infallible" (CP 247) . Carroll
writes:
In this poem the clash of yes and no reduces
itself to a simple opposition between the
oblivion of the night and the physical world of
the sun. Within the sun, reality is composed
only of the parts of the world, and to emphasize
that particularity, Stevens hypothetically strips
himself of all the parts except one, "No greater
than a cricket's horn." The brief rhapsody that
follows this hypothetical reduction draws on the
diction and imagery of the sublime— "The aureole
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above the humming house"— but no firm concept
emerges, and the poem remains a fragment composed
of elements that are not fully integrated (141) .
Once Stevens arrives at his desired realization of
a single affirmation as the image/sound of "The form on
the pillow humming while one sleeps, " its self-
contained existence as a thing/sound in itself is
quickly followed by a second image/sound of "the
aureole above the humming house . . . ." The ellipsis
at the end of the line suggests Stevens' awareness of
the possible appearance of a third, fourth, fifth (and
so on) image of related scene and sound. For Stevens,
the image, like the poem, "constantly requires a new
relation" (OP 202) in order to maintain the vitality of
its own existence and power of signification.
As the poems "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird" and "Six Significant Landscapes" suggest,
"The Well Dressed Man With a Beard" is a poem of image
and sound which cannot fully be put to rest in the mind
of one who at once sees and hears its two-fold
presence. At the conclusion of "The Search for Sound
Free From Motion," Stevens declares that
The world lives as you live.
Speaks as you speak, a creature that
Repeats its vital words, yet balances
The syllables of a syllable (CP 268) .
and thus illustrates an earlier point made in the
"Adagia" that "There is nothing in life except what one
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thinks of it" (OP 188). Because the mind is always
active in relation to the perpetual activities of the
natural world, Stevens is almost forced to conclude
"The Well Dressed Man With a Beard" with the line: "It
can never be satisfied, the mind, never."
Nevertheless, while Stevens' moment of poetry is
manifested in a series of relational layerings of
mental images/sounds which seem to reflect and respond
to the movements of the natural environment, his desire
to experience a perfect center of pervading stillness
of mind, a "permanent realization" (CP 425) is
precisely what the final line of the poem seems to
indicate as an impossibility. Stevens strongly
expresses this same kind of desire in "This Solitude of
Cataracts," in which he writes:
He wanted the river to go on flowing the same
way,
To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it.
Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed
fast.
He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind
to rest
In a permanent realization, without any wild
ducks
Or mountains that were not mountains, just to
know how it would be,
Just to know how it would feel, realized from
destruction,
To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis.
Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass,
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Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury centre
of time (CP 425) .
What Stevens describes here as "the azury centre
of time" is a desire to experience the world without
thought, in a state of permanent silence and freedom.
This desire is, of course, a radical departure from the
over-imposition of thought present in "The Well Dressed
Man With a Beard," however, whether Stevens'
acknowledges the impossibility of his desire or he
anticipates its eventual arrival, it remains generally
true that
The fulfillment Stevens seeks is a poetic vision
of the supreme spirit creating space and time and
manifesting itself in each creative act of human
consciousness. Within this spirit, all
oppositions— between mind and material reality,
here and there, then and now, signifier and
signified, and the individual and the whole— are
resolved in a 'pure principle' of sentient
relation (CP 418) . the pure principle animates
'The essential poem at the centre of things' (CP
440) that generates the appearances of both
phenomenal reality and poetry (Carroll, 8) .
The issue in poetry for Stevens in not
specifically centered on the notion of fulfillment as a
resolution but rather as a vision of relation, an
appearance, a tone of thought or sense of spirit.
Here, in "the generation of consciousness through the
meditation of being and nothingness becomes the
essential theme of [Stevens'] visionary poetry"
(Carroll, 81) . This point is better articulated by
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Stevens himself at the beginning of "A Primitive Like
an Orb":
The essential poem at the centre of things.
The arias that spiritual fiddlings make,
Have gorged the cast-iron of our lives with good
And the cast-iron of our works. But it is,
dear sirs,
A difficult apperception, this gorging good,
fetched by such slick-eyed nymphs, this essential
gold.
This fortune's finding, disposed and re-disposed
By such slight genii in such pale air (CP 440) .
"The Red Fern"
J. Hillis Miller writes of "The Red Fern, " a
little-discussed work from Transport to Summer, that
"This poem opens itself like a red fern, unfolding its
leaves from stanza to stanza of proliferating phrases,
like mist-mites and dangling seconds" (153) . While
Miller admits the poem "opens itself relatively easily
to exegesis" (153), he also stresses in his
interpretation of the poem Stevens' idea that "poetry
should resist the intelligence almost successfully" (OP
171). "The Red Fern":
The large-leaved day grows rapidly
And opens in this familiar spot
Its unfamiliar, difficult fern
Pushing and pushing red after red.
There are doubles of this fern in clouds
Less firm than the paternal flame,
Yet drenched with its identity,
Reflections and off-shoots, mimic-motes
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And mist-mites, dangling seconds, grown
Beyond relation to the parent trunk:
The dazzling, bulging, brightest core.
The furiously burning father-fire . . .
Infant, it is enough in life
To speak of what you see. But wait
Until sight wakens the sleepy eye
And pierces the physical fix of things (CP 365) .
What is meant by Stevens' statement that poetry
should resist the intelligence almost successfully?
For Miller, "The moment when the intelligence resumes
mastery over a poem may be no more than an illusory
clarity of the mind gained by suppressing elements
which can never be mastered by logic" (156) or any kind
of analysis. The opening stanza of "The Red Fern"
gives the reader an initial sense of mastery over its
rather simple and familiar descriptions of daybreak and
the natural growth of the fern, however, these images
of fecundity quickly shift from an emphasis on the
realm of empirical representation to the transparency
associated with the realization "There are doubles of
this fern in the clouds, / Less firm than the paternal
flame, / Yet drenched with its identity, / Reflections
and off-shoots, mimic-motes / And midst mites" (CP
365). Stevens' fusion of opacity and familiarity
create the perplexity of the poem as it begins to open
like the fern and grow fully in the light of day but at
the same time resists any interpretation which
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coincides with its illuminating and self-offering
surface.
J. Hillis Miller argues that the very idea of
"day" which the poem expresses itself connotes a
significant level of surrounding abstractions. He
writes:
The word day, in its encompassing abstraction, as
a name for the whole temporal period we oppose to
night, names not the sun but what the sun brings.
Day is a name for everything under the sun but
the sun" 157).
What Miller essentially describes here is Stevens'
tendency to write about the influence of an image,
figure or idea, and not just about its subject-
identity. And although Stevens uses the figure of the
sun as the governing influence of the poem, he never
names it as "sun." Miller writes:
The sun is not one of those things we encounter,
see, and know ‘ under the sun. ' The ' sun' can
therefore only be named in figure, veiled or
misted in metaphor, covered by a word or words
which serve as a protection against the dander of
blinding (154).
Just as we experience "the sun [as] the source of
all illumination and of all procreative energy,
vitality, and growth" (Miller, 154) , it remains true
that "it cannot itself be looked at directly. To look
the sun straight in the eye is to be blinded " (Miller
154). And to look straight at Stevens' poem is also to
be blinded, in a way, to its effect as an influence
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and illumination of perception. The final stanza
directs the reader to a new perception of the world
(reality) through the eyes of the infant poet, who
Miller calls "a child of the sun, one of its
reflections, mimic-motes and exterior resemblances"
(155) . For Stevens, everything and everyone under "the
paternal flame" of the sun is a reflection of its
dominance. While the sun makes things visible,
knowable and nameable, Stevens' infant poet is warned
against the inclination "To speak of what you see."
For "Sight," and not merely seeing, "wakens the sleepy
eye / And pierces the physical fix of things. " As
Miller points out:
Sight may be a figure for the illumination of the
external world when the sun rises. The eye is
sleepy because there is nothing to see, but when
light floods the world and is disseminated
everywhere, then the fact that there is now
something to see wakens the sleepy eye (160) .
The seemingly simple question remains: What is
this something to see? I believe what remains to be
"seen" for Stevens is something which no one is
actually able to see and name and know. Just as the
sun pervades over and determines the existence of the
red fern, Stevens seems to recognize a pervading force,
"a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration"
(NA 32) to the path of poetry which only the "acutest
poet" {NA 32) may realize.
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Stevens writes of the presence of this condition,
which is a condition enabling the seer (the poet) to
experience man's land-locked set in terms of a
perspective moving toward the edge of the possibility
of perspective, at the conclusion of "An Ordinary
Evening in New Haven" :
These are the edgings and inchings of final form.
The swarming activities of the formulae
Of statement, directly and indirectly getting at.
Like an evening evoking the spectrum of violet,
A philosopher practicing scales on his piano,
A woman writing a note and tearing it up.
It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade (CP 489).
Frost's directive in "The Figure a Poem Makes"
that poetry yield "a momentary stay against confusion"
(2) is at once enlarged and deepened by Stevens
concentration on poetry as an awakening of the sleepy
eye, a visibility of thought, even in its most
ineffable or fleeting moments. Stevens sense of poetic
language and thought seems to more closely resemble
Emerson's lines from "The Poet" in which he writes:
The poet has a new thought; he has a whole new
experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was
with him, and all men will be richer in his
fortune. For the experience of each new age
requires a new confession, and the whole world
seems always waiting for its poet (230) .
For Emerson, as well as Stevens, the movement of
the poem, even if that movement is toward the total
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disillusionment of the image or the poem or the text,
must contain and sustain its own potential to reveal
not just meaning but a new experience of meaning, "a
new confession." Richard Poirier, in Poetry and
Pragmatism, locates in Emerson the potential for
writing to reflect the shaping "signs of power" new
experiences and confessions of meaning naturally
embody. Poirier writes: "To return to Emerson's 'Art,'
we look to writing not for meanings but for 'signs of
power,' 'tokens of the everlasting effort to produce'"
(98), the new confessions required for every new age of
artistic production.
Stevens' moment of poetry as it is expressed in
his poetry often directs the reader by Emersonian signs
of power which operate as tropes for certain conditions
of being or thinking or seeing. For Stevens, these
tropes--the presence or absence of sun, the movements
of water and clouds, the music in the sound of words--
become the "tokens of the everlasting [desire] to
produce." The conclusion of "The Red Fern" reflects
the eventuality of this desire to produce something
under the light and power of the sun which, rather than
concentrating solely on "the physical fix of things,"
may instead "[pierce] the physical fix of things" and
reveal a governing underbody or influence of creation.
Thus, in terms of "The Red Fern," Stevens' moment of
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poetry may be best described as a moment of waiting and
anticipation for the return of the experience of the
"tokens of the everlasting [desire] to produce." As
Randall Jarrell points out in an essay about The
Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens in his The Third
Book of Criticism:
Stevens does not think of inspiration (or
whatever you want to call it) as a condition of
composition. He too is waiting for the spark
from heaven to fall— poets have no choice about
this— but he waits writing; and this--other
things being equal, when it's possible, if it's
possible— is the best way for the poet to wait"
(66) .
For Stevens, this act of waiting in anticipation
for the next poem to appear may constitute what he
calls "my true poems" [OP 289) . In a beautiful address
made upon receiving The National Book Award for The
Collected Poems on January 25, 1955, the year of his
death, Stevens states:
Now, at seventy-five, as I look back on the
little that I have done and as I turn the pages
of my own poems gathered together in a single
volume, I have no choice except to paraphrase the
old verse that says not what I have written but
what I aspired to be that comforts me. It is not
what I have written but what I should like to
have written that constitutes my true poems, the
uncollected poems which I have not had the
strength to realize [OP 289).
Here Stevens does much more than merely borrow a
paraphrase of old verse to characterize his "true
poems" as unrealized, he actually seems to hint at the
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idea of the moment of poetry being held in a suspended
or future effect of figuration "Of things that would
never be quite expressed / Where you yourself were
never quite yourself / And did not want nor have to be"
(CP 288) . For Stevens, the actual poem seems to appear
in between thought and act, anticipation and
completion, imagination and reality.
"The Red Fern," like many of Stevens' poems of
perception and placement (the relationship between
thoughts organized in the mind and things organized in
the world) , leads one to ask the very question Emerson
asks at the beginning of "Experience" :
Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which
we do not know the extremes, and believe that it
has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair;
there are stairs below us, which we seem to have
ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one,
which go upward and out of sight .... Sleep
lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night
hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree.
All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so
much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we
glide through nature, and should not know our
place again (216).
As Emerson states in response to his own question,
we find ourselves in a middle point of unawareness, in
a state of purgatorial perception where, while "all
things swim and glitter," we often fail to recognize
the fascinating and characteristic particularities of
being, nor do we allow these movements of the natural
scene to direct us toward a moment of artistic
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creation/enactment. Rather, we allow things to exist
in our minds as our minds exist: sleepy, complacent and
unaware. Stevens' dream for the possibility of poetry
to waken the sleepy eye and see the world "with the
hottest fire of sight" (CP 373) recalls Emerson's own
idea of the "dream of genius." Richard Poirier writes
in The Renewal of Literature that
there is always for the poet, as Stevens imagines
him, an unsatisfyable aspiration, the dream of an
impossible possibility: to see something without
having to name it, without having to think about
it, to see it without having to re-create it, to
see it as would a transparent eyeball, with no
sense of its dependence on the human will. This,
it might be recalled, is Emerson's dream of
'genius' : to know a world without knowing it as
text (210) .
Since the poet must employ an imperfect language
to attempt to depict the world in its perfect form, his
textualizations of the world are, at best,
approximations of that "something" which lies beyond
the boundaries of language or textuality.
In "The Man with the Blue Guitar, " Stevens sees
the artist (poet) as "A shearsman of sorts" (CP 165)
who, on the one hand realizes that
I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can (CP 167) .
but on the other hand desires to compose
A tune beyond us as we are
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar (CP 167).
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After exploring his complex relationship to sound
and sense throughout the poem, Stevens' shearsman comes
to realize in the penultimate stanza "That there should
be an intercourse with 'things, ' cleaner or more real
that any permitted by language, truer and more honest
than language allows" (Poirier, The Renewal of
Literature 210). Stevens writes:
Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that.
But do not use the rotted names.
How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,
Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand
Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.
You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you (CP 183).
The moment of poetry in "The Red Fern, " as well as
"The Man with the Blue Guitar, " lies in its expressed
(although not expressly stated in the poem)
anticipation for a new expression beyond language,
beyond the construction of textual signification. What
Emerson's figure of the transparent eyeball and
Stevens' shearsman share is a desire to represent the
world through a voice of "Not evocations but last
choirs, last sounds / With nothing else compounded,
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carried full, / Pure rhetoric of a language without
words" (CP 374) . And while Stevens realizes this
desire for poetry to go beyond language and textuality
and manifest a form of a non-linguistic, non-textual
signification is, of course, a supremely difficult
task, he nevertheless directs his poems toward this
ambition through certain ineffable "signs of power" and
a belief in the potential of poetry to reflect this
possibility. Once realized, it is the experience of
(and within) the poem that resides, remains and
sustains the poem, the poet and the reader/listener.
For Stevens, this experience is quite different from
the mere act of determining the "meaning" of a thing,
image or idea. As Stevens asks in "The Irrational
Element in Poetry: "When we find in poetry that which
gives us a momentary existence on an exquisite plane,
is it necessary to ask the meaning of the poem" (OP
228) .
"Large Red Man Reading"
The difficult task Stevens set for himself in
poetry to "transform intimations into convictions"
(Pearce 126) proved to be a life-long struggle, yet as
Harold Bloom writes of The Auroras of Autumn,
"[Stevens] did not solve the dilemmas and recurrent
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crises of his poetry, nor did he transcend them, but he
compelled himself to render his struggles with them in
a finer note" (253) . "Large Red Man Reading" from The
Auroras of Autumn, may be viewed as a further extension
of Stevens' struggle with his ambition for poetry to
approximate a reality of perception beyond the
confining structures of naming and textuality; however
unlike "The Red Fern," "Large Red Man Reading" places
the ideas of reading, naming, text and interpretation
at the center of "the literal characters [and] vatic
lines (CP 424) which the poet, as the figure of the
large red man, reads. As Emerson writes in "The Poet,"
"The condition of true naming, on the poet's part, is
his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes
through forms, and accompanying that" (239-240).
Stevens' poem signifies the occasion of the poet's
reading, and the desire for this reading to manifest
the "the divine aura" of poesis Emerson calls "true
naming."
There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear
his phrases.
As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue
tabulae.
They were those from the wilderness of stars that
had expected more
There were those that returned to hear him read
from the poem of life.
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the
table, the tulips among them.
They were those that would have wept to step
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barefoot into reality,
That would have wept and been happy, have
shivered in the frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers
over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on
what was ugly
And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of
the purple tabulae,
The outlines of being and its expressings, the
syllables of its law:
Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic
lines.
Which in those ears and in those thin, those
spended hearts,
Took on color, took on shape and the size of
things as they are
And spoke the feeling for them, which is what
they had lacked (CP 424).
While Charles Altieri claims the poem is about
"completing the physiognomy of earth" (112) and Harold
Blooms calls it "a poignant lyric apologia" (295),
"Large Red Man Reading" seems to concentrate on the
complexities of reading and being read. Altieri points
out that
Reading is a form of attention to phenomena that
so involves investments in both the text and the
world that it also becomes a paradigm for certain
attitudes toward the self. Certain texts lead us
to desire not only a deeper grasp of the world
projected but a fuller identification with the
power of what we might call the textualized
author (113).
Altieri's statement on reading is what Stevens'
poem speaks to, if interpreted as an connection of
ontological identification between the "ghosts" who
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return to earth and the textualized author. The basis
for this return and sought after identification with
the author (the red man) is, of course, an act of
reading. Yet, the reading from the blue (which later
changes to purple) tabulae seems to represent much more
than "the literal characters, the vatic lines" of the
text, it seems to serve as a kind of self-examination
and search for truth made possible in a language of the
earth. Once again, Altieri writes that "Reading can be
desiring to become, or glimpsing ourselves becoming, a
certain kind of person figured as possible by the
activity as well as the content of a text" (114) .
Those who return to earth to hear the large red
man reading seem to all desire some kind of
transformation made possible only in hearing "the poem
of life" which celebrates such familiar images as "the
pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips
among them. * Their desire is to once again return to
the reality/images of the earth, and the familiarity of
temporal, earth-bound experience, so as to engage and
enact the content of the red man's text of life.
However, more than simply causing the listener's to
reidentify themselves with things in and of the world,
the reading also seems to operate as an engergizing
influence and brings its listeners into a condition of
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being and desire they can only imagine becoming through
textualization.
While the listeners may, on the one hand, identify
with the "literal characters" of the red man's poem,
and therefore experience a desire "to step barefoot
into reality," "run fingers over leaves" and "[seize]
on what was ugly, " it remains that the lines of the
poem are described as "vatic lines" (CP 424). The
vatic lines
Which in those ears and in those thin, those
spended hearts,
Took on color, took on shape and the size of
things as they are
And spoke for feeling for them, which was what
they had lacked (CP 424).
The characterization of the lines as having a
prophetic effect sets up Altieri's point that the
listener's desire an identification with the power of
the textualized author. In this respect, the
personages of the author, as well as his listeners,
appear to disappear as the power or influence of the
text comes to manifest itself as a significant force
and modify the minds and hearts of those listening.
"Large Red Man Reading" may be viewed as a perhaps
one of the most complete and comprehensive examples a
typically Stevensian moment of poetry as it concerns
itself with the complexities of the very path of poetry
itself. Since Stevens believes that poetry is
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perception as words, and that words are sounds, and
that sounds are heard and understood in the mind of the
listener, and that this understanding renews perception
and changes understanding, it remains that for Stevens,
the beginning and end of what he calls "the path of
poetry" is the force and flow of perception. As
Stevens writes in "The Noble Rider and the Sound of
Words":
The deepening need for words to express our
thoughts and feelings which we are sure, are all
the truth that we shall ever experience, having
no illusions, makes us listen to words when we
hear them, loving them and feeling them, makes us
search the sound of them, for a finality, a
perfection, an unalterable vibration, which it is
only within the power of the acutest poet to give
to them. Those of us who may have been thinking
of the path of poetry, those who understand that
words are thoughts and not only our own thoughts
but the thoughts of men and women ignorant of
what it is that they are thinking, must be
conscious of this: that, above everything else,
poetry is words; and that words, above everything
else, are, in poetry, sounds (NA 32).
"Large Red Man Reading follows Stevens' own
position here that our perceptions, as represented by
the sound of words (poetry) , are directly related to
our sense of truth, love and feeling. In this respect,
Stevens seems to maintain a particular position or role
for poetry in the world which stresses the significance
of its vatic or prophetic quality of its words, and not
the idea that words merely represent what one sees— as
a kind of static or stable vision— in the world. As
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the final stanza of the poem points out, the words
(perceptions made audible) of the large red man, who
may indeed correspond to Stevens' own vision of "the
acutest poet," have a transfiguring influence on those
who listen to his reading. The influence of the sound
of words indeed marks a point of transformation as they
signify a fulfillment of desire
Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended
hearts.
Took on color, took on shape and the size of things
ass they are
And spoke for feeling for them, which was what they
had lacked.
In opposition to Altieri's position that this is a
poem about "completing the physiognomy of earth" (112),
Stevens' poem seems to correspond more to a human
desire to at once "complete in am unexplained
completion" (CP 512) the physiognomy of humanity
through the path of poetry in one great "poem of life."
Such a universal and cosmological completion is not
simply a completion of text in terms of "the syllables
of its law, * it is a reminder of the transformative
power of poetry to sustain the lives of all readers and
all listeners of the poem. The large red man reading,
then, exemplifies Stevens' figure of the poet as one
capable of creating such a poetry beyond its initial
influence as text or image or scene, and begins to
approximate a perception of existence which he sees and
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relies on as a source of virtual interest and
satisfaction. As Randall Jarrell states: "At the
bottom of Wallace Stevens' poetry there is wonder and
delight, the child's or animal's or savage's— man's—
joy in his own existence, and thankfulness for it. He
is the poet of well-being" (305) . Perhaps it is from
the position of wonder, delight and thankfulness which
Jarrell sees in Stevens' poetry which allows Stevens to
conclude his essay "The Noble Rider and the Sound of
Words" with the following lines: "[Poetry] seems, in
the last analysis, to have something to do with our
self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the
expression of it, the sound of words, helps us to live
our lives" (NA 36).
"Large Red Man Reading" places the reader at the
center of the large red man's (poet's) reading (poem),
and in this respect enacts Stevens' own aphorism that
"Poetry is the expression of the experience of poetry"
(OP 190) . The experience of the poem, as I have tried
to argue, is an experience of transformation and self-
preservation, as that which indeed helps those who hear
"The outlines of being and its expressings" to live
their lives with a more profound awareness of the
color, shape and size of things as they are. As Joseph
Riddel writes in The Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and
Poetics of Wallace Stevens: "Stevens' resolutions,
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understandably, are not to console but to confirm
poetry's undeniable place in human experience, as a
stay against disintegration" (231), and "Large Red Man
Reading" is such a confirmation of poetry's power to
preserve human experience as a poesis of ultimate
fulfillment.
"Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself"
As a final word— and— moment of poetry, Stevens
chose to conclude his Collected Poems with "Not Ideas
About the Thing But the~Thing Itself." While it is
indeed true that Stevens spent a lifetime in poetry
attempting to realize a "central" or "supreme" poem— as
Riddel points out, "Stevens' search for the ultimate or
central or supreme speaks always in terms of
possibility, of the potential of the mind and not of
actuality" (275)— he did manage, in at least one poem,
to not only proclaim a discovery of the "thing" beyond
the mind, but also have this "thing" share with the
mind a mutual origin, the sun (Riddel 275) . This
connection between the self (poet), the thing itself
(poem) and their solar origin is anticipated in "The
Planet on the Table," another poem from Stevens' final
book, The Rock. Here Stevens writes of this triangular
connection:
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His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self
Were no less makings of the sun.
It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part (CP 533) .
"Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself"
takes its direction from "The Planet on the Table" and
traces, "if only half-perceived / In the poverty of
their words," "Some lineament or character / Some
affluence" which operates as a governing force or
influence in poetic expression. Just as the sun's
primal and completely dominant influence over all
things, plants and animals is forever constant, Stevens
sought a similarly primal and dominant force in poetry,
which, although remains unnamed, is at times called
"nobility" or "the thing itself," and it is his sense
and anticipation of the manifestation or realization of
this prodigious influence of poetry which pervades the
entirety of this final poem. It is indeed a fitting
conclusion to Stevens' Collected Poems:
At the earliest ending of winter.
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a cry in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
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The sun was rising at six.
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache . . .
The sun was coming from outside.
That scrawny cry--it was
A chorister whose c proceeded the choir.
I was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings.
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality (CP 534).
Stevens' poem anticipates, in a series of
transparent relationships and conditions of weather,
sound, thought and sense, the governing force or
influence he seeks. And yet, because virtually every
image and idea which the poem utilizes appears in a
state of conditionality, becoming, evasiveness and
ineffability, the force of poetry Stevens seeks equally
evades full manifestation and self-definition. Here
Stevens presents a world governed by ventriloquism and
papier-mache, of sounds in the mind and seasonal
transition, all of which give the poem its force as
itself a veiled piece of language of preceded sounds
which ultimately come to signify the transition from
one particular sense/sound/scene to another: "A new
knowledge of reality."
Although it is not unusual for Stevens to frame
his poem in winter, he does so "At the earliest ending
of winter, " a particular point of the beginning
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transition, from the barrenness of winter to the
productivity of spring. The signal of the possibility
of this productivity is, of course, the sound of "A
scrawny cry from outside" which "Seemed like a sound in
his mind." It is the word "seemed" which has caused
critics to debate the presence of the sound and its
role in the poem, however Helen Vendler's point in Part
of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets seems best
suited to Stevens' poem of emerging images and
conditional states of awareness. Vendler writes of the
cry that
It is not the triumph of the trumpeting
imagination, but the scrawny cry of its emergent
birth that represents Stevens' utmost sublime.
It is a sublime of denuded language, a sublime of
indicative effort, as the pale sunshine and
scrawny cry of March testify to the wish to
transform winter into spring (11) .
Vendler's criticism places Stevens' poem, I
believe, in its natural place and status of
proclamation, transition and becoming. Once the poem
is announced like "a scrawny cry from outside" (CP
534) , it moves through a series of transformations
(seemings) and into the final anticipation of "A new
knowledge of reality" (CP 534) . For Stevens, the poem
proceeds as the image, the sound, the thought comes
into existence, and thus it (the poem in the form of
the sound, image or thought) appears to the poet in any
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number of manifestations. Just as Stevens writes about
the force of nobility in "The Noble Rider and the Sound
of Words," as that which "distorts itself and seeks
disguise" (NA 34) as quickly as it appears, the
vocalization of the bird's cry or the manifestation of
the sun's rising reveals itself to the listener/viewer
as a simultaneous beginning and ending— as a presence
as well as an absence— of the sound or image.
In the twelfth canto of "An Ordinary Evening in
New Haven, " Stevens reminds his reader that "The poem
is the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res itself
and not about it. The poet speaks the poem as it is"
(CP 473) . Because "Not Ideas About the Thing but the
Thing Itself" is a poem "spoken" by the poet as it is
(as it becomes what it is), it is therefore a poem of
the transparency and ineffability of poetry itself.
The poem begins rather simply as a person (a poet)
awakens "at the earliest ending of winter" and hears
(seems to hear) a bird's cry from above and outside as
an interior sound in the mind. While Stevens wrote
years earlier in "Autumn Refrain" that the poet "shall
never hear that bird" (CP 160) , here the poet "knew
that he heard it / A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
/ In the early March wind" (CP 534) . As the poet's
certitude is sounded at the beginning of the second
stanza ("He knew that he heard it"), the sound of the
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cry itself is understood in relationship to a
subsequent series of other mediating presences which
come to suggest some kind of newfound certainty about
the surrounding reality in which the cry is heard. As
Roy Harvey Pearce has argued, "Inside the mind the cry
is "scrawny." Outside, it is— not is of— "A chorister
whose c proceeded the choir" (125). Moreover, the cry
is heard in the light of a more visible sun than
before. The transparency suggested by the
characterization of the previous winter sun as "a
battered panache above snow ..." or "the vast
ventriloquism / Of sleep's faded papier-mache ..."
(CP 534) is simplified, as well as clarified, by the
transitional statement of characterization: "The sun
was coming from outside." It is the nature of this
move from a perception of reality as something veiled
or half-seen to a subsequent vision of reality which
fulfills the poet's need to discover, as Stevens writes
in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,"
The poem of pure reality, untouched
By trope or derivation, straight to the word,
Straight to the transfixing object, to the object
At the exactest point at which it is itself,
Transfixing by being purely what it is,
A view of New Haven, say, through the certain
eye.
The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight
Of simple seeing, without reflection (CP 471).
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It is the possibility of realizing this "poem of pure
reality" which haunts, as well as inspires, Stevens'
work. Randall Jarrell found such a quest part of the
difficulty of Stevens' late work, as he asks in his
"Reflections on Wallace Stevens": "Where in the
ordinary late poem are the real particulars of the
world— the people, the acts, the lives— for us to put
our faith in?" (142). It becomes evident that Stevens'
late poems search for something other than "the real
particulars of the world" and seem to concentrate on a
possible perception of the world as a thoughtful
manifestation of tone, color and appearance in
language. I keeping with this particular line of
argument, Joseph Riddel views Stevens' late poetry as
"a visibility of thought" (264) , when "thought itself
has become the poet's reality, and the act of thinking
his mode of belief" (264) . Riddel's position may
generalize Stevens' own desire to discover (or at least
sense) a central particularity of thought/feeling which
he could identify, even without naming, a kind of "elan
vital" (Bergson) , "prime origin" (Plato) or "calling"
(Allen Grossman) or "nobility" (Stevens) of poetry. In
such a search for this central "visibility of thought, "
(the poetry within the poem) , meaning becomes
secondary. As Stevens writes in the "Adagia, " "A poem
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need not have a meaning and like most things in nature
often does not have" (OP 201) .
Given the idea that Stevens need not name exactly
what he seeks in poetry, it is here, in the kind of
unnameable space, realm and moment of the poet's sense
of the elan vital ("vital life") or "the prime origin"
that Stevens may seek (and at times discover) his own
sense of a "new knowledge of reality" (CP 534) thorough
poetry. And although the realization of this new
knowledge is "Still far away" in "Not Ideas About the
Thing but the Thing Itself," the process of Stevens'
poem, as it moves from the poet's self-governing
internal transparency of thought ("a sound in his
mind") to an association of the cry (the thought) with
the external governing certainty of the sun ("It was
part of the colossal sun"), suggests that for Stevens
"A new knowledge of reality" is indeed possible in
poetry as mind and matter, imagination and reality
forever coalesce.
Stevens writes in the "Adagia" that "The poetic
view of life is larger than any of its poems (a larger
thing than any poem) and to recognize this is the
beginning of the recognition of the poetic spirit" (OP
199) . Although Stevens' expression of the moment of
poetry may vary from the "heavenly labials" of "The
Plot Against the Giant" to the "Scrawny cry" of "Not
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Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself, " his poems
share a common goal to reach, as he does, I believe, in
the last line of the final poem his The Collected
Poems, "A new knowledge of reality" (534) . For
Stevens, this reality is a reminder of the productive
power of poetry to continuously refigure not only the
ways in which one thinks and feels about the world, but
also to refigure the world in terms of "the poetic
spirit, " the incalculable expanse of the imagination"
(OP 289) by which the poet is directed. As Stevens
writes in an address to the National Book Society in
1955, the year of his death:
Humble as my actual contribution to poetry may be
and however modest my experience of poetry has
been, I have learned through that contribution
and by the aid of that experience of the
greatness that lay beyond, the power over the
mind that lies in the mind itself, the
incalculable expanse of the imagination as it
reflects itself in us and about us. This is the
precious scope which every poet seeks to achieve
as best he can (OP 289).
What Stevens describes here at the end of his life
and career as a poet recalls the idea of Stevens'
"theoria" of poetry as a process of meditation
contemplation and enactment of experience as an
"incalculable expanse of the imagination as it reflects
itself in us and about us" (my emphasis) .
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Notes
1. To write about the moment of poetry in Stevens'
work is to acknowledge a force, feeling or tone which
essentially resists any definite interpretative
conclusion. My aim in this particular chapter is,
taking my cue from Stevens' own perspective in critical
writing, to enlarge and elevate the significance of the
poem as a meditation, contemplation and enactment of
poetry. To do this is to acknowledge the ambiguity of
the work while at the same time giving credence to its
harmony, breadth and being. As Stevens writes in "A
Primitive Like an Orb":
We do not prove the existence of the poem.
It is something seen and known in lesser poems.
It is the huge, high harmony that sounds
A little and a little, suddenly.
By means of a separate sense. It is and it
Is not and, therefore, is. In the instant of
speech.
The breadth of an accelerando moves.
Captives the being, widens— and was there (CP
440) .
2. I do not intend to suggest that these seven poems
represent the entirety of Stevens' expression of the
moment of poetry. I have selected these in order to
demonstrate the various ways in which Stevens sought to
bring the "real" or "familiar" into the "unreal" or
"unfamiliar, " and to do so under the general
interpretational guise of Stevens as a meditative,
visionary poet. My intention is merely to offer, like
Stevens "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
offers, an interpretative range of perspective on one
particular subject.
3. Allen Grossman outlines the significance of the
Orpheus and Philomela stories on the production and
practice of poetry in Western civilization. Regarding
Orpheus, he writes: "For the West the name (Orpheus)
signifies the person who signifies by poetic making,
poesis, and all speaking about Orpheus is speaking
about the origin and logic of speaking in the poetic
way" (230) . Grossman continues to state that the story
about Orpheus is "a story which founds the poetic work
as a human work
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Works Cited
Altieri, Charles. "Why Stevens Must be Abstract, or
What a What a Poet Can Learn from Painting. "
Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism, edited
by Albert Gelpi. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985.
Bevis, William W. Mind of Winter: Wallace Stevens,
Meditation, and Literature. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988.
Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our
Climate. Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 1977.
Boroff, Marie. "Sound Symbolism as Drama in the Poetry
of Wallace Stevens. ELH, vol.48, 1981.
Carroll, Joseph. Wallace Stevens' Supreme Fiction: A
New Romanticism. Baton Rouge and London:
Louisiana State University Press, 1987.
Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Capricorn
Books, 1958.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Journals of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, vol. 9. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by
Richard Poirier. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990.
The Best of Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Essays, Poems, Addresses. New York: Walter J.
Blace, Inc., 1941.
Filreis, Alan. Wallace Stevens and the Actual World.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Frost, Robert. Selected Poems of Robert Frost. New
York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1989.
Grossman, Allen. "Orpheus/Philomela: Subjection and
Mastery in the Founding Stories of Poetic
Production and in the Logic of Our Practice."
TriQuarterly 77 (Winter 1989/90) : 229-248.
210
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Grossman, Allen, with Mark Halliday. The Sighted
Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Reader and
Writers. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1992.
Halliday, Mark. Stevens and the Interpersonal.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Jarraway, David. Wallace Stevens and the Question of
Belief: Metaphysician in the Dark. Baton Rouge
and London: Louisiana State University Press,
1993.
Jarrell, Randall. The Third Book of Criticism. New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965.
Miller, J. Hillis. "Invisible Metaphor: Stevens' 'The
Red Fern' as Example." Yale French Studies 69
(1985): 150-162.
The Linguistic Moment. Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Theory now and then. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1991.
Oates, Joyce Carol. New Heaven, New Earth: the
visionary experience in literature. New York: The
Vanguard Press, 1974.
Pearce, Roy Harvey. "The Last Lesson of the Master."
The Act of the Mind: Essays on the Poetry of
Wallace Stevens, edited by Roy Harvey Pearce and
J. Hillis Miller. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University, 1965.
Poirier, Richard. A World Elsewhere: The Place of
Style in American Literature. London: Oxford
University Press, 1966.
Poetry and Pragmatism. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1992.
The Literature of Renewal. New
York: Random House, 1987.
Raine, Kathleen. The Inner Journey of the Poet. New
York: George Braziller, Inc., 1982.
Riddel, Joseph N. The Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and
Poetics of Wallace Stevens. Baton Rouge:
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Louisiana State University Press, 1965.
Scott, Nathan Jr. Visions of Presence in Modem
American Poetry. Baltimore and London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Steiner, George. Language and Silence: Essays on
Language, Literature, and the Inhuman. New York:
Atheneum, 1967.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace
Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.
Letters of Wallace Stevens. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.
The Necessary Angel: Essays on
Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage
Books, 1951.
Opus Posthumous. New York: Vintage
Books, 1990.
Vendler, Helen. Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of
Desire. Knoxville: University of Knoxville Press,
1984.
Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modem
American Poets. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1980.
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The presence of poetry promises (before it contracts
any other thing) the infinity of the person, and,
insofar as it embodies the original calling, places the
"reader" at the origin of human being as in itself it
is.
Allen Grossman, "The Calling of Poetry: The
Constitution of Poetic Vocation, the
Recognition of the Maker in the
Twentieth Century, and the Work of the
Poet in our Time"
These are not pages of criticism nor of philosophy.
Nor are they merely literary pages. They are pages
that have to do with one of the enlargements of life.
Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays
on Reality and the Imagination
CHAPTER FIVE:
A VIOLENCE FROM WITHIN: STEVENS AND THE ORIGIN OF
POETRY AS NOBILITY AND CALLING
In a rather casual tone, Stevens states at the
beginning of the final section of his essay "The Noble
Rider and the Sound of Words": "Here I am, well-
advanced in my paper, with everything of interest that
I started out to say remaining to be said" (NA 27) .
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While Stevens' essay does address several important
ideas such as the role of function of the poet in
society, the pressure of reality on social development
and the relationship between reality and the
imagination, these merely serve as a kind of
illustrative foundation for what becomes the primary
focus of Stevens' writing: the word, concept, idea,
force he considers fundamental in all poetry:
"nobility."
While it may be argued that Stevens' understanding
of nobility may have its origin in the very example he
uses to begin his essay— Plato's famous example in the
Phaedrus of the allegory of the charioteer and his
winged horses in imaginative flight— it may seem more
appropriate to locate its central influence in another
conceptual idea from the Phaedrus which Plato calls
"the prime origin."
Plato's example of the myth of the charioteer and
two winged horses serves to demonstrate his previous
point about the immortality of the soul, however as
Stevens writes:
we have scarcely read the passage before we have
identified ourselves with the charioteer, have,
in fact, taken his place and, driving his winged
horses, are traversing the whole of heaven. Then
suddenly we remember, it may be, that the whole
of heaven no longer exists and we droop in our
flight and at last settle on solid ground (NA 3-
4) .
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For Stevens, "the existence of the soul, of
charioteers and chariots and of winged horses is
immaterial" (NA 4) since "a charioteer driving his
chariot across the whole heaven was for Plato precisely
what he is for us. He was unreal for Plato as he was
for us" (NA 4). While the example adheres to and
intensifies its own condition of unreality, it also
prevents readers who are imaginatively moved by the
example from participating in any corresponding reality
it may contain. Although one may be moved by Plato's
example, Stevens writes that "we are moved as
observers. We recognize it perfectly. We do not
realize it. We understand the feeling of it, the
robust feeling, clearly and fluently communicated. Yet
we understand it rather than participate in it (NA 4-
5). This necessity of the poet to participate in the
imaginative center or origin of the poem, which Allen
Grossman calls "the voice prior to particular meanings
heard at the beginning in the calling" (229-230),
directs Stevens' poems, like the flight of Plato's
charioteer and winged horses, "from the above to the
beneath" (Grossman 221) . That is, for Stevens the poem
is directed by a kind of pretextual movement of
initiation during which the poet senses reality from
above and outside its temporal-spatial stabilizing
conditionality.
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Stevens' poetry, then, is indeed a poetry of
movement, an activity of the most august imagination.
In Stevens work, this movement is often represented by
a world which manifests itself as a process of
becoming, so that "things as they are" march, move,
flow, creep, cry, flutter, fall or fade into being and
are thus given life and sustained in their motion.
However, beside merely signifying a process of lateral
growth or transformation as "becoming, " Stevens poems
also signify, as Grossman points out, a distinct
vertical directional influence (which he terms "the
calling of poetry") which may provide much more
significant insight into the origin and essence of the
work of the poet and the poetry of our time. Moreover,
the fact that Stevens ultimately comes to envision
Plato's figure of the charioteer and the winged horses
falling in flight and settling on solid ground leads
him to pursue the idea of nobility in "The Noble Rider
and the Sound of Words" not as something proceeding to
a fixed point of stasis but as a more all-inclusive
force at once "evasive and inaccessible" [NA 34) and
yet resolving itself "into a number an enormous number
of vibrations, movements, changes" [NA 34) . Plato
describes such a condition of motion in the Phaedrus as
"the prime origin":
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Only what moves itself never ceases to be in
motion, since it could not so cease without being
false to its own nature; it is the source and
prime origin of movement in all other things that
move. Now a prime origin cannot come into being;
all that comes into being must derive its
existence from a prime origin, but the prime
origin itself from nothing; for if a prime origin
were derived from anything, it would no longer be
a prime origin.
Moreover, since it does not come into being,
it must also be indestructible; for since all
things must be derived from a prime origin, if
the prime origin is destroyed, it will not come
into being again out of anything, nor any other
thing out of it. So we see that the prime origin
of motion is what moves itself, and this can
neither be destroyed nor come into being;
otherwise the whole universe and the whole
creation would collapse and come to a stop, and
there would be nothing by which it could again be
set in motion and come into existence (49) .
The status Plato gives to his idea of the prime
origin as itself uncreated and yet the creator of all
things in movement, space and time seems to correspond
to Stevens' own sense of nobility as "a force and not
the manifestations of which it is composed, which are
never the same" (NA 35-36) . In both instances, Plato's
awareness of the prime origin and Stevens' awareness of
nobility each function as a certain kind of universal
daimonic influence over creation, which, as Robert
McGahey points out in his book The Orphic Moment:
Shaman to Poet-Thinker in Plato, Nietzsche, and
Mallarme, "has to do with the ability to move between
modes" (24) and "fill the entire universe, having as
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[it] does the potential to interconnect all of its
parts" (24). 1
For Plato, the concept of the prime origin is
daimonic in the manner that it gives motion and thought
to all things. In a sense, Plato attempts to describe
not only the immortality of the soul in terms of its
"capacity of initiating motion" (Phaedrus 46) , but also
the prodigiousness of all created things arising out of
a particular origin that is both uncreated and
indestructible. Given the primacy of Plato's concept,
his notion of the prime origin must precede his example
of the charioteer and winged horses in the Phaedrus,
since the example is used to represent the presence,
activity and immortality of the soul, that is,
precisely what he refers to as the prime origin. Thus,
the prime origin operates as the a priori or initial
point and foundation of creation and may be represented
by the artist as a moment of realization, emotion,
movement, nothingness, desire or invocation to which
artists are always incessantly turning.
Emerson writes of the poet's turning to this
poetic a priori in his essay, "The Poet." He writes:
"For poetry was all written before time was, and
whenever we are so finely organized that we can
penetrate into that region where the air is music, we
hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them
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down" (229) . For Emerson, as well as for Stevens, the
poet, "the men of more delicate ear [who] write down
these cadences more faithfully" (Emerson 229) than
those with ears not so finely tuned, suddenly find
themselves not in a critical speculation of description
of reality, but in a holy place . . . and go [there]
very warily and reverently" (Emerson 232) .
Helen Vendler points out in Part of Nature, Part
of Us: Modem American Poets that Stevens did approach
the idea of nobility, this "holy place" (Emerson 232)
quite warily and reverently. She writes: "Though
Stevens, in many poems, among them some of his most
successful, skirted the problem of grandeur and
nobility, nevertheless it troubled him and continued to
recur throughout his life" (7) . Stevens recognized at
once the difficulty and necessity of discovering "the
affirmations of nobility" (NA 35) as the poet's
"occasional ecstasy" and "special privilege" (NA 35) .
He writes in "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words:
For the sensitive poet, conscious of negations,
nothing is more difficult than the affirmations
of nobility and yet there is nothing that he
requires of himself more persistently, since in
them and in their kind, alone, are to found those
sanctions that are the reasons for his being and
for that occasional ecstasy, or ecstatic freedom
of the mind, which is his special privilege (NA
35) .
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For the poet, and for poetry in general, Stevens
interprets nobility not just as "a kind of total
grandeur at the end, / With every visible thing
enlarged" (CP 510) or as the "Total grandeur of a total
edifice" (CP 510) , but also as a fundamental connection
to the potential of "the human community" (Grossman
231) to also envision for itself "that occasional
ecstasy, or ecstatic freedom of the mind" {NA 35) which
poets and poetry bring into existence. In this
respect, poetry "intends to bring the world to mind,
and finally intends to bring the Mind to mind, like the
face of the face which makes all faces recognizable—
the simile which dignifies and explains and regulates
the world of persons" (Grossman 221) - Stevens views
these "intentions" of poets not as tasks but rather as
a kind of awareness of the daimonic presence of their
influence. He writes:
The poet refuses to allow his task to be set for
him. He denies that he has a task and considers
that the organization of materica poetica is a
contradiction in terms. Yet the imagination
gives to everything it touches a particularity,
and it seems to me that this particularity of the
imagination is nobility, of which there are many
degrees. This inherent nobility is the natural
source of another, which our extremely headstrong
generation regards as false and decadent. I mean
the nobility which is our spiritual height and
depth; and while I know how difficult it is to
express it, nevertheless I am bound to give a
sense of it. Nothing could be more evasive and
inaccessible. Nothing distorts itself and seeks
disguise more quickly. There is a shame of
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disclosing it and in its definite presentations a
horror of it. But there it is. The fact that it
is there is what makes it possible to invite to
the reading and writing of poetry men of
intelligence and desire for life (NA 33-34) .
Rather than making an attempt to define nobility,
since as he writes "If it is defined, it will be fixed,
and it must not be fixed" (NA 34) , Stevens attempts to
"disclose" the term through its presence in poetry and
reality. However, the difficulty of these disclosures
of nobility becomes the very manner in which Stevens
identifies the poet to its significance, as he states
"The manner of it is, in fact, its difficulty, which
every man must feel each day differently" for himself
(NA 33).
Nevertheless, just as Plato's vision of the prime
origin operates as a kind of da.imon.ic force of
creation, Stevens' view of nobility functions in a
similar way for poetry. For Stevens, the nobility of
poetry signifies the very foundation, center or soul of
poetry itself- And since he states is his introduction
to The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the
Imagination that poetry is "one of the enlargements of
life" (NA viii) , the manner, force and flow of nobility
guides the poet and the poem toward these enlargements
through a particular series of callings which focus the
mind of the poet and the poem on the very idea of
poetic practice, as well as how this practice of poetry
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may serve a much larger concern. What Stevens seems to
finally value as an ineffable and elusive condition of
nobility is the survival of what Allen Grossman has
referred to as "the human interest." In this respect,
poetic (all artistic) representation is viewed by
Stevens not simply as subject or theme (what is) but as
a kind of enactment of the condition of nobility (the
daimonic guidance and sanctifying love) in human
experience. When this experience "writes" the poem,
and thus when the reader engages this writing on the
level of this experience, poetry becomes a life force
of undeniable size and strength. As Stevens concludes
"The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," "[The poetry
of nobility] seems, in the last analysis, to have
something to do with our self-preservation; and that,
no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of
words, helps us to live our lives" (NA 36).
According to Allen Grossman in his brilliant
lecture/essay "The Calling of Poetry: The Constitution
of Poetic Vocation, the Recognition of the Maker in the
Twentieth Century, and the Work of the Poet in our
Time," poetry is indeed vitally connected to the "four
cardinal points of human reference" (221) . These four
points not only characterize the nature of poetic
practice in our time, they together offer themselves as
an apt description, and enlargement, of Plato's vision
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of the prime origin as "the essence and definition of
soul" (Phaedrus 49) , as well as Stevens' view of
nobility in art and life as "our spiritual height and
depth" (NA 33-34).
After citing an example from Bede in which Caedmon
is told in a dream to "Sing about the beginning of
created beings," Grossman begins his own song or
discourse on "the beginning of created things" by
stating that "poetry comes to pass in a moment which is
constituted of four callings or vocations" (221). 2 He
writes:
First there is ‘poetry'— which somehow calls to
us from above the 'outside.' We feel it,
everybody always feels it always calling ....
Second, there are the 'poets' who call back to,
or invoke, poetry from the beneath, or they 'go
up. ' ‘Sing in me, muse' they say . . . There are
also (thirdly) 'poems.' Poems point to poetry.
Poems call out to the human community . . . and
point . . . always in any case saying that poetry
is something like this, but not like this. And
there are (fourthly) what we name 'readers' who
are ourselves, the final callers and summoners
and also the destination of the calling (221).
Although Grossman structures his piece into four
separate points of calling, there is indeed a process
and interconnectedness to the four which converge in
the creation of a moment of poetry. Poetry calls to
poets from above; poets call back from below; the
poet's poem invokes poetry and are read by readers who
represent the human community. At the moment of the
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initial calling, which Grossman calls "the first
calling to the poet from the above to the beneath"
(227), a second calling is made in response. As
Grossman states,
This is the second calling, back to the source of
poetic language . . . the scene of our writing in
which by naming our job of work 'poetry' we call
upon a 'transcendental' second person (the 'you'
above whom we address) for the purpose of
reaching to the immanent or mortal 'you' we love
(230).
This poet's recognition of the transcendental
"you" which calls from above (Stevens would call this
"you" nobility) in terms of the "you" "Which is not
part of the listener's own sense" (CP 377), creates a
difficulty or dangerousness that both Stevens and
Grossman recognize. While Stevens points out in "The
Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" that "nothing is
more difficult than the affirmations of nobility" (NA
35) as it is placed in the face of "the pressure of
reality " (NA 34) , Grossman also point out that
The second calling of the poet to the source of
the poet's power is always reconstitutive and
regulative in intention . . . but also always
dangerous (entailing an overcoming of
epistemological lateness, and ontological
distance, a willing of infinity and permanence
which may require the breaking of the whole human
world) , addressed back toward the moment of the
first calling--evoking the 'dead' master, who may
be living or dead (230-231) .
The overcoming of epistemological lateness and
ontological distance created in the moment of merging
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the calling of poetry (what Grossman calls the source
of poetic language) and the poet's response to the
calling is accomplished in a kind of poetry which
recognizes that, as Stevens writes in "The Irrational
Element in Poetry, " "not the true subject [of the poem]
but the poetry of the subject is paramount" (OP 227) .
Grossman pursues a similar angle of interpretation in
offering the idea that out of the call-and-response
moment between poetry and poet, the result and object
of that interactive experience— the poem--becomes
secondary to "the virtual poem (the eidos) which it
indicates" (231) . For Grossman, the distinction
between poetry and the poem is indeed significant in
that "the separated and provisional self is summoned by
the calling out of the time of personal life into the
transpersonal time of the poetic vocation, which is the
ground of that life" (226) . As Stevens writes in the
"Adagia, * "The poetic view of life is larger than any
of its poems (a larger thing than any poem) and to
recognize this is the beginning of the recognition of
the poetic spirit" (OP 199). It is this poetic spirit
(Stevens' nobility), vocation (Grossman's notion of
poetic calling) and motion (Plato's prime origin) of
poetry which is the poet's daimon or soul guide; and
since it is the poet's task to represent this daimon in
the various language of the human community, the poem
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comes to represent the calling of the entire community
renew and order itself under the guidance of what
Grossman calls "the solicitation of the power of
immortalizing prosopopoeia" (231). He writes:
The second calling back to 'poetry' by the poet
asserts (as I have said) that the poem is not the
poetry. Rather it is in search of poetry with
the hope of finding, governed by the
understanding that the supply of the poetic
function will extinguish the need for the poem.
Only when we understand that the actual poem as
it comes to pass (our text) is radically
nonidentical with the virtual poem (the eidos)
which it indicates is it rational to include
among the motives to enact this calling the
intention of an account of self not entirely
subject to the merely given present, in effect,
the solicitation of the power of immortalizing
prosopopoeia: a renewal, at the source, of the
fundamental language of communicability— and (I
wish now to emphasize) a prayer from the human
community (that summons the poet for this
purpose) for the means to order the energies of
the self conceived as mind (dangerous and
endangering), which constitute humanity and are
not in themselves human (231) .
Grossman's directive here clearly emphasizes the
primary importance of the source of creative energy,
poetry, and not the product of that energy, the poem.
It is the initial calling, prior to the poem, which
makes the virtual poem possible. And like Plato's
vision of the prime origin as the uncreated creator,
the function of Grossman's idea of calling is that it
not only puts the poem in motion, it also directs the
poet through its source as a "fixed point, universal
and permanent" (230) . Grossman states that
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It is the voice prior to particular meanings
heard at the beginning in the calling— the fixed
point, universal and permanent (though infinitely
variable across gender, culture, class)— in
reference to which as to the countenance of deep
Mind we check our poems— that we cam see it in
order to do this we must realize that poetry is
not constituted of poems but of the indication of
deep Mind, the idea of the countenance in the
first calling, of which the poem is only a moment
(and not the only moment) as a water wave is a
moment in the global transit of a force of
another kind (230).
Since the poet is directed and governed by the
first calling, the poet's poems must reflect "the
indication of deep Mind" by which he/she is lead. In
this respect, the poem becomes a kind of announcement,
a promulgation of "the cry of its occasion" (CP 473).
For Grossman, the extension of the poem's influence is
that it calls out to the human community in a cry of
which is the cry of the occasion of the poem itself.
Thus, "the indication of deep Mind" which directs the
poet also comes to direct the community into a kind of
"practice" of poetry so that "the logic of the poetic
mind . . . becomes the practice of a person, the
paideia, for the poet is always a teacher of the
nation" (Grossman 232) . Since the poem "regulates and
manifests not itself . . . but the human world of
persons" (Grossman 237), those who receive the poem as
a calling from "the above to the beneath" are also
guided by the spirit, vocation and motion of poetry,
since they in turn "call back toward the poet" in a
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particular manner of reception and response. As
Grossman states:
In response to the calling of the poet to the
human world there arises the final, the fourth
calling of poetry, by the human world back toward
the poet to renew the contribution of the poet's
practice in history: the restoration of the
energies of the universe, that enter time as the
first or originary calling, to the world of
persons in human form (the countenance that
speaks our language) (232) .
In heeding this particular calling from "the human
world," Grossman's structure is at once complete and
made virtual, as readers are placed in the presence of
a poetry which places the "reader" at the center of its
force and form. Grossman concludes with the following
message:
What the calling wants of us is that we open the
whole book of poetry and read it without aversion
to its nature and with the intention of finding
its human form--thereby painting (as Dante says)
the forces of being, including mind with 'our
likeness' (rostra effige) moved thereto by the
confident expectation that it is the failure of
the recognition which the calling constructs that
endangers us (238).
Here the cycle of Grossman's construct is
completed and yet returns to the initial calling of
poetry; that is, within the structure of the four
callings is also the virtual, governing quality of the
calling--poetry. Nevertheless, as Grossman points out,
the danger of failing to recognize the calling of
poetry is indeed a profound threat not only to the poet
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but also to the human community which is itself called
to continue the presence of poetry in the world. David
St. John has pointed this out as well. He writes in
"Poetry, Hope, and the Language of Possibility":
Poetry is a web woven of a resilient, mirrored
fibre spun from all of our voices, all of our
languages. Each time we speak within a poem, it
ripples with reflections, our own and others',
showing us the prismatic face of hope; and in its
voices we hear too the echo that is the future,
which speaks, as poetry must, with the fragile
but luminous grammar of possibility (214) .
Similarly for Stevens, the potential failure of a
people to recognize the calling of poetry before them
is overshadowed and silenced by what he calls in "The
Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" "the pressure of
reality." Stevens addresses the idea of by first
giving a sense of term as "the pressure of an external
event or events on the consciousness to the exclusion
of any power of observation" fNA 20) . What Stevens
suggests here is that the pressure of an external
event, such as the pervading social and political
events of his day--war or the news of war— has the
power to consume the minds of a people to the extent
that no other means or methods of observation become
possible. As he wrote in a letter to Leonard C. van
Geyezel, "I shall be most grateful to you if you will
continue to bear the Buddha in mind. Somehow or other,
with so much of Hitler and Mussolini so drastically on
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one's nerves, constantly, it is hard to get around to
Buddha" (Letters 337) . Under such stress, the world
becomes reduced to the presence and significance of
these external political and social events and thus
challenges the possibility for poetry and the life of
the imagination to sustain itself as a powerful
sanctifying influence in the world. Stevens states:
But when one is trying to think of a whole
generation and of a world at war, and trying at
the same time to see what is happening to the
imagination, particularly if one believes that
that is what matters most, the plainest statement
of what is happening can easily appear to be an
affectation (NA 20).
The pressure of reality Stevens faced was a
reality of violence, however "not physically violent,
as yet, for us in America, but physically violent for
millions of our friends and for still more millions of
our enemies and spiritually violent, it may be said,
for everyone alive" (NA 26-27) . As Stevens writes, the
"poet must be capable of resisting or evading the
pressure of reality of this last degree, with the
knowledge that the degree of today may become a
deadlier degree tomorrow" [NA 26-27) . To combat the
possibility of physical and spiritual violence from
determining our sense of the world as "solid, static
objects extended in space" [NA 31) , the poet is called
to poetry by "the particularity of the imagination" [NA
230
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33) Stevens calls "nobility," that force which "poets
have sought after, more curiously and more piously,
certain of its obscure existence" (NA 35) . For
S tevens, nobi1i ty
is a violence from within that protects from a
violence without. It is the imagination pressing
back against the pressure of reality. It seems,
in the last analysis, to have something to do
with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt,
is why the expression of it, the sounds of its
words, helps us to live our lives (NA 36) .
Stevens' sense of nobility seems to follow the
directive Grossman outlines in his essay, as his poems
often mediate between the obscurity of the initial
calling of poetry ("the source of the poet's power") as
an interior presence, and the final expression of that
calling, made in the sound of words, as a connection to
the human community of readers who share the experience
of this calling (nobility) with the poet, through the
poem. Just as Grossman stresses the idea that it is
not the poem as text but the calling— or cry— of poetry
as "eidos" which gives poetry its power as an
"immortalizing prosopopoeia" (231), Stevens' poems as
text, that is, as representations of an external scene,
often give way to primacy of the cries, sounds, motions
and moments of poetry within the scene. For example,
"Two Figures in Dense Violet Night" sustains itself not
simply on Stevens' description of a Florida night, but
231
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on the surrounding obscurity which governs the night:
"dusky words and dusky images," "sea-sounds in silence"
(CP 86), "droning sibilants" (CP 86) and stars falling.
In "The Idea of Order at Key West" the sea described is
a sea of calling to the woman (poet) who hears "its
mimic motion / Made constant cry, caused constantly a
cry, / That was not ours although we understood, /
Inhuman of the veritable ocean" (CP 128) . And, in "The
Creations of Sound, " Stevens recognizes, as Grossman
does, that the cries or callings of poetry may "rise /
From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak" (CP
311) .
The sound Grossman describes as "the voice prior
to particular meanings heard at the beginning of the
calling" (229-230) not only initiates the poem it
sustains it, Stevens states, as "one of the sanctions
of life" (OP 252) . Although this may be the sound
Stevens' describes in the final poem in The Collected
Poems, "Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing
Itself," it is not offered as a final cry, but rather
as an initial calling of poetry to the poet who hears
"At the earliest of winter, / In March, a scrawny cry
from outside / Seemed like a sound in his mind" (CP
534) . The importance of the sound Stevens' poet hears
is that it represents the voice at the beginning of the
calling; as Stevens writes, "That scrawny cry— it was /
232
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A chorister whose c preceded the choir" (CP 534) . In
this respect, the sound is what Stevens calls a
"pretext for poetry" (OP 224) and marks, as an initial
calling, the opportunity for the poet, as well as for
the entire human community, to experience a "new
knowledge of reality" (CP 534) through a kind of
Emersonian awareness of the various sounds, senses and
possibilities of poetry which actual world promulgates.
Given that "the central theme of Emerson's life
and work is that of possibility " (McDermott 30) , it is
no wonder he applied this theme to his vision of
poetry. According to Emerson, once the poet views the
world as possibility, "a new nobility is conferred"
(248) . Emerson writes: "And this is the reward: that
the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of
the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious,
but not troublesome to thy invulnerable essence" (249) .
What Emerson describes here as the poet's "reward" of
heightened perception of the fecundity of the actual
world is further exemplified in the final lines of "The
Poet." For Emerson, poetry turns the "transparent
boundaries" of expression--in nature as in experience—
into a source of sustaining Beauty for the poet, such
that all manifestations of nobility (or "grandeur" or
"the sublime" or "poetry") present themselves with both
233
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the omnipotence and omnipresence of a divine (yet
indefinable) significance. He concludes:
Whatever snow falls or water flows or birds fly,
wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever
the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with
stars, wherever are forms with transparent
boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial
space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love—
there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for
thee, and though thou shouldst walk the world
over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition
inopportune or ignoble (249) .
Emerson's message to the poet, and to the people
(Grossman's "human community") is clear: "We are to
transform the obviousness of our situation by a
resolute penetration into the liberating symbolism
present in our own experience" (McDermott 31) of the
world. For Stevens, Grossman and Emerson poetry is the
supreme liberating symbolism of all the world. And
although "We do not prove the existence of the poem /
It is the huge, high harmony that sounds / A little and
a little, suddenly" (CP 440), and thus the poem is
known (exists) in its sounding and symbolism. In
keeping with Emerson's vision of possibility, Stevens
writes in "Things of August," that the poetry of
nobility indeed issues forth
a new text of the world,
A scribble of fret and fear and fate,
From a bravura of the mind,
A courage of the eye,
In which, for all the breathings
From the edge of night,
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And for all the white voices
That were rosen once,
The meanings are oux own—
It is a test that we shall be needing.
To be the footing of noon,
The pillar of midnight,
That comes from ourselves, neither from knowing
Nor not knowing, yet free from question,
Because we wanted it so
And it had to be,
A text of intelligent men
At the centre of the unintelligible.
As in a hermitage, for us to think,
Writing and reading the rigid inscription (CP
495) .
Here we find Stevens' cosmic project for a poetry of
reconciliation and renewal expressed in the terms of
meditation, contemplation and enactment. For Stevens,
the poetry of the poem issues forth out of a particular
desire ("Because we wanted it so / And it had to be"),
yet is a desire of passive pleasure "That comes from
ourselves, neither from knowing / Nor not knowing, yet
free from question." And thus, Stevens' work moves
from the prosaic to the poetic
Without the labour of thought, in that element.
And we feel, in a way apart, for a moment, as if
There was a bright scienza outside of ourselves
A gaiety that is being, not merely knowing,
The will to be and to be total in belief,
Provoking a laughter, an agreement, by surprise"
(CP 248).
235
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Notes
1. McGahey provides a good account of the history of
meaning surrounding the term daimon, although it is
primarily my intention to use it as a signification of
a kind of soul-guide or life-partner in one's life and
work. Relating to this particular contextualization of
the word, McGahey points out that
As a separate entity, one could hold a
conversation with it, as Socrates did with his
daimonion. It was a kind of lif e-partner. With
the age of the tragedians Herakleitos' notion of
the daimon as one's personal fate gained
currency. Plato sees the daimon as a soul-guide
in Phaedrus [as] both nous and condition of life
(150).
In The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling,
James Hillman refers to the daimon as our unique "soul-
companion, * the "carrier of [one's] destiny" (8).
2. Grossman uses the word "calling" in his
lecture/essay to suggest several levels of meaning,
including calling as an invocation, occupation, duty or
purpose.
236
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Works Cited
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Best of Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Essays, Poems, Addresses. New York: Walter J.
Black, Inc., 1941.
Grossman, Allen. "The Calling of Poetry: The
Constitution of Poetic Vocation, the Recognition
of the Maker in the Twentieth Century, and the
Work of the Poet in Our Time. TriQuarterly 79
(Fall 1990): 220-238.
Hillman, James. The Soul's Code: In Search of
Character and Calling. New York: Random House,
1996.
McDermott, John J. Streams of Experiences: Reflections
on the History and Philosophy of American Culture.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.
McGahey, Robert. The Orphic Moment: Shaman to Poet-
Thinker in Plato, Nietzsche, and Mallarme. New
York: State University of New York Press, 1994.
Plato. Phaedrus and Letters VI and VII, translated
with introductions by Walter Hamilton. New York:
Penguin Books, 1973.
St. John, David. Where the Angels Come Toward Us:
Selected Essays, Reviews & Interviews. New York:
White Pine Press, 1995.
"Poetry, Hope, and the Language of
Possibility." Antioch Review 48.3 (Summer 1990):
209-214.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace
Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.
The Necessary Angel: Essays on
Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage
Books, 1951.
Opus Posthumous. New York: Vintage
Books, 1990.
Letters of Wallace Stevens. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.
237
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Vendler, Helen. Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modem
American Poets. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1980.
238
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Asset Metadata

Creator Madruga, John Charles (author)

Core Title "Poetry is the expression of the experience of poetry": Wallace Stevens' "Theoria" of belief

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag literature, American,Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor [illegible] (committee chair), [illegible] (committee member), Muske-Dukes, Carol (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c17-389065

Unique identifier UC11353438

Identifier 9919077.pdf (filename),usctheses-c17-389065 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 9919077.pdf

Dmrecord 389065

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Madruga, John Charles

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA