Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic

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Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic

Also available by Bart Eeckhout LITERATURE AND SOCIETY: The Function of Literary Sociology in Comparative Literature (co-edited with Bart Keunen) POST EX SUB DIS: Urban Fragmentations and Constructions (co-edited with the Ghent Urban Studies Team) THE URBAN CONDITION: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis (co-authored and co-edited with the Ghent Urban Studies Team) WALLACE STEVENS AND THE LIMITS OF READING AND WRITING

Also available by Edward Ragg THE QUESTION OF ABSTRACTION: Wallace Stevens’ Poetry and Prose (forthcoming)

Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic Edited by

Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg With a Preface by Frank Kermode

Uitgegeven met steun van de Universitaire Stichting van België Published with support of the University Foundation of Belgium

Editorial matter and selection © the editors 2008 Individual chapters © the contributors 2008 Preface © Frank Kermode 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978--0--230--53584--8 ISBN-10: 0--230--53584--4

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic : edited by Bart Eeckhout & Edward Ragg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-230-53584-4 (alk. paper) 1. Stevens, Wallace, 1879 1955 Criticism and interpretation. 2. Stevens, Wallace, 1879 1955 Appreciation Europe. 3. Stevens, Wallace, 1879 1955 Appreciation Europe. 4. Stevens, Wallace, 1879 1955 Influence. 5. Modernism (Literature) I. Eeckhout, Bart, 1964 II. Ragg, Edward, 1976 PS3537.T4753Z8735 2008 811’.52 dc22 2008015882 10 17

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Notes on Contributors

viii

Acknowledgements

xi

List of Abbreviations

xiii

Preface by Frank Kermode

xv

Introduction: The Lights of Norway and All That Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg

Part I Descriptions without Place: Ideas of Europe in Stevens

1

11

1

‘The Switzerland of the Mind’: Stevens’ Invention of Europe George Lensing

13

2

Stevens in Connecticut (and Denmark) J. Hillis Miller

23

3

Stevens’ Europe: Delicate Clinkings and Total Grandeur Robert Rehder

41

Part II Beyond Staten Island: Stevens in Transatlantic Conversation

59

A

PHILOSOPHICAL CONVERSATIONS

59

4

Stevens and the Crisis of European Philosophy Charles Altieri

61

5

‘Without human meaning’: Stevens, Heidegger and the Foreignness of Poetry Krzysztof Ziarek

6

Early Christianity in Late Stevens Justin Quinn

7

‘The strange unlike’: Stevens’ Poetics of Resemblance Josh Cohen

v

79 95 107

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Contents

B

ARTISTIC CONVERSATIONS

119

8

Stevens, Duchamp and the American ‘ism’, 1915–1919 David Haglund

121

9

Picasso, Cézanne and Stevens’ Abstract Engagements Edward Ragg

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Music and the Vocal Poetics of Stevens and Valéry Lisa Goldfarb

151

10

Part III Getting It Straight at the Sorbonne? Stevens’ Afterlife in Europe

163

11

Nicholas Moore, Stevens and the Fortune Press Mark Ford

165

12

A Ghost Never Exorcized: Stevens in the Poetry of Charles Tomlinson Gareth Reeves

186

A Poetics of Ignorance: António Ramos Rosa and Wallace Stevens Irene Ramalho Santos

204

13

14

Reading Stevens in Italian Massimo Bacigalupo

216

Coda: Ode to a Colossal Sun Helga Kos

231

Index

237

List of Illustrations (Plate section falls between pages 230 and 231 and reproduces images from the artist’s book Ode to the Colossal Sun created by Helga Kos) 1 2

3 4

5 6 7

Volume 1. Title page (printed on an advanced duplicator) Volume 1. Above: Prelude part with CD of ‘Last Poems of Wallace Stevens’. Below: detail (printed on an advanced duplicator) Volume 1. Above: ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’. Below: detail (linoleum prints with screen-printed main text) Volume 2. Above: opened at ‘A Child Asleep in Its Own Life’ and Volume 3 opened at ‘A Clear Day and No Memories’. Below: Volume 2 opened at ‘The Dove in Spring’ and Volume 3 opened at ‘Of Mere Being’ (mixed printing techniques) Volume 3. Above: ‘A Clear Day and No Memories’. Below: detail (mixed printing techniques) Volume 2. Above: ‘The Planet on the Table’. Below: detail (printed in off-set from hand-painted plates) Volume 3. ‘Of Mere Being’ (laser prints in combination with screen print)

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Notes on Contributors Charles Altieri, Stageberg Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley, is the author of ten books, including Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1984), Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1989), Canons and Consequences (Northwestern University Press, 1990), Postmodernisms Now (Penn State University Press, 1998), The Particulars of Rapture (Cornell University Press, 2003) and The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After (Blackwell, 2006). Massimo Bacigalupo, Professor of American Literature and of Literary Translation, University of Genoa, is the author of The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (Columbia University Press, 1980) and Grotta Byron (Campanotto, 2001), and an award-winning translator of Stevens, Pound and Wordsworth, among others. He contributed a paper on ‘The Mediterranean in Pound, Yeats, and Stevens’ to Anglo-American Modernity and the Mediterranean, ed. Caroline Patey et al. (Università di Milano, 2006). Josh Cohen is Reader in English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of London and is the author of Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing (Pluto, 1998), Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy (Continuum, 2003) and How to Read Freud (Granta, 2005). In July 2004 he organized a symposium on Stevens at the University of London. Bart Eeckhout is Associate Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Antwerp. He is the author of Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (University of Missouri Press, 2002) and has guestedited two special issues of The Wallace Stevens Journal (Fall 2001 and, with Edward Ragg, Spring 2006), of which he is also an editorial board member. He is a translator of Stevens into Dutch and, with Edward Ragg, co-organized the international conference ‘Fifty Years On: Wallace Stevens in Europe’ (Rothermere American Institute, August 2005). Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College London. He has published widely on British, French and American poetry. His publications include Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (Faber, 2000; Cornell University Press, 2001), A Driftwood Altar: Reviews and Essays (Waywiser, 2005), and two collections of poetry, Landlocked (Chatto & Windus, 1992, rpt 1998) and Soft Sift (Faber, 2001; Harcourt Brace, 2003). viii


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Lisa Goldfarb is the Associate Dean of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, and a member of the full-time faculty. She is the author of many articles on Stevens and Valéry (The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Romanic Review and the Journal of Modern Literature) and is completing a book entitled ‘The Figure Concealed’: Valéryan Music in the Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens. She is also preparing an international conference on Stevens in New York. David Haglund is completing a DPhil on Stevens at Balliol College, Oxford University. He has taught at Harvard and Hunter College as well as Oxford, and has published articles and reviews in the London Review of Books, Essays in Criticism, PN Review, Slate magazine and elsewhere. Frank Kermode is the author/editor of some forty volumes and one of the most distinguished critics of our time. In the world of Stevens criticism he is well-known as one of the poet’s earliest champions in Europe, witness his introductory monograph Wallace Stevens (Faber, 1960, rpt 1989), and as joint editor (with Joan Richardson) of Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997). Helga Kos is a visual artist from Amsterdam. She spent five years (1998– 2003) working on a hand-printed artist’s book, Ode to the Colossal Sun, which was inspired by Ned Rorem’s 1972 song cycle ‘Last Poems of Wallace Stevens’. The book has been exhibited internationally, including displays in Montreal, Buffalo, Leipzig, Paris and Oxford, and was short-listed for the award of ‘Best Book Designs from All Over the World’. George Lensing, Mann Family Distinguished Professor of English, University of North Carolina, is the author of Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth (Louisiana State University Press, 1986) and Wallace Stevens and the Seasons (Louisiana State University Press, 2001). He is on the editorial board of The Wallace Stevens Journal, for which he also serves as book review editor. J. Hillis Miller is Research Professor at the University of California, Irvine and one of the most influential literary scholars of our time. He holds various honorary degrees and is past president of the Modern Language Association of America. Among his long-standing research interests is the poetry of Stevens, about which he has published for more than four decades, from Poets of Reality (Harvard University Press, 1965) over The Linguistic Moment (Princeton University Press, 1985) to Topographies (Stanford University Press, 1995) and beyond. J. Hillis Miller is the author of more than twenty books, highlights of which have been collected in The J. Hillis Miller Reader (Stanford University Press, 2005).

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Justin Quinn, educated at Trinity College Dublin, is Associate Professor at the Charles University of Prague. He is the author of Gathered Beneath the Storm: Wallace Stevens, Nature and Community (University College Dublin Press, 2002), besides being a poet and poetry translator from the Czech. He is at work on The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800–2000. Edward Ragg completed his doctorate on Stevens at Cambridge University in 2005 and teaches at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He has published several articles in The Wallace Stevens Journal and is completing a book entitled The Question of Abstraction: Wallace Stevens’ Poetry and Prose. With Bart Eeckhout he co-organized the international conference ‘Fifty Years On: Wallace Stevens in Europe’ (Rothermere American Institute, August 2005); and subsequently guest-edited a special issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal (Spring 2006). He has published poetry in Carcanet’s New Poetries IV anthology as well as in PN Review, Agenda, Critical Quarterly and other international magazines. Irene Ramalho Santos, Professor of English and American Studies, University of Coimbra, and International Affiliate, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of several articles on American poetry (including many on Stevens) and of Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism (University Press of New England, 2003; Brazilian edition, Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2007; Portuguese edition, Porto: Afrontamento, 2008). Gareth Reeves, Reader in English, Durham University, is the author of two books on Eliot, T. S. Eliot: A Virgilian Poet (Macmillan, 1989) and T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), of Auden, MacNeice, Spender (Macmillan, 1992; with Michael O’Neill), of two volumes of poetry, Real Stories (Carcanet, 1984) and Listening In (Carcanet, 1993), and of many essays on twentienth-century English, Irish and American poetry. Robert Rehder, Chair of English and American Literature, University of Fribourg, Switzerland; is the author of Stevens, Williams, Crane and the Motive for Metaphor (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), The Poetry of Wallace Stevens (Macmillan, 1998) and Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry (Croom Helm, 1981). He is also a poet and has published The Compromises Will Be Different (Carcanet, 1995). He has published two books of poetry, The Compromise Will Be Different (Carcanet, 1995) and First Things When (Carcanet, 2009). Krzysztof Ziarek, Professor of Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo (SUNY), is the author of Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness: Heidegger, Levinas, Stevens, Celan (New York State University Press, 1994) and The Force of Art (Stanford University Press, 2004).

Acknowledgements The roots of the present collaboration stretch back some three years, when we organized what was arguably the first major European conference on Wallace Stevens, entitled Fifty Years On: Wallace Stevens in Europe (August 2005). We remain deeply grateful to Paul Giles and the staff of The Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, for hosting and sponsoring the intellectually energizing conference that brought several of the authors assembled here together for the first time. What follows, however, are not the published proceedings of that conference, but predominantly new essays that grew, in part, out of the debate initiated at The Rothermere. Following that event, we were fortunate to publish a number of papers, based on conference presentations, both in The Wallace Stevens Journal and PN Review (publications that aptly symbolized the Transatlantic nature of our and our authors’ work). We are much indebted to John N. Serio, who invited us to guest-edit the Spring 2006 issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal on ‘Stevens and British Literature’, and to Michael Schmidt, who published three other significant papers derived from the Oxford event in PN Review 169 (May–June 2006). Specifically, we would like to acknowledge the publication of early versions of the essays here by David Haglund and Gareth Reeves in PN Review and The Wallace Stevens Journal respectively. Further thanks are due to the University Foundation of Belgium for its financial support and its double peer review of the manuscript. The publication grant we have received from the University Foundation has made a significant difference to the appearance of the book, both in enabling us to include illustrations from Helga Kos’s artist’s book and in supporting the reproduction on the cover of Tom King’s early design for our conference poster. Bringing the colour design from Tom King’s Mondrian-inspired depictions of Stevens to this project provides a fitting graphic emblem for what we attempt to do here, while Helga Kos’s ingenuity, lovingly reported in the coda to our book, is given added weight by the images accompanying her essay. We are most happy to thank also our editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Paula Kennedy, Christabel Scaife, Steven Hall and Penny Simmons, for their persistent help, encouragement and exemplary guidance. Publishing a volume of essays featuring a broad range of international contributors has its own rewards and challenges; and we are particularly appreciative of the exacting criticism and author care we have received. This includes the two anonymous referees who at different stages in the book’s composition process supported our project and provided invaluable feedback. xi

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Acknowledgements

Lastly, it gives us great pleasure to thank our diverse and distinguished group of contributors for their sustained and invariably professional work in helping us assemble what we hope is not only a significant addition to Stevens criticism, but also an original attempt to redefine the contours of that criticism in a new era of appreciation for Stevens’ work.

List of Abbreviations The following abbreviations for the works of Wallace Stevens are used throughout. As a rule, references to poems and prose are to the Library of America edition edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (abbreviated as CPP). References to earlier editions appear only sparingly for text-intrinsic reasons. Page references are provided for individual poems in the main text only where those poems are discussed in some detail. CP

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1954.

CPP

Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997.

CS

The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie. Ed. J. Donald Blount. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006.

FPof P

‘From Pieces of Paper’. In George S. Lensing, Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986. 166–200.

L

Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966; rpt Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

OP 1957

Opus Posthumous. Ed. Samuel French Morse. New York: Knopf, 1957.

OP

Opus Posthumous. Revised edition. Ed. Milton J. Bates. New York: Knopf, 1989.

SP

Holly Stevens, Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1977.

SPBS

Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujets: Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace Book. A Facsimile and Transcription. Ed. Milton J. Bates. Stanford: Stanford University Press and Huntington Library, 1989.

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Preface Frank Kermode

Since this rich volume is concerned with the impact of Wallace Stevens on Europe, and of Europe on Wallace Stevens, I hope it may be allowed as relevant rather than condemned as immodest of me to claim that I introduced the Swiss to Stevens at some date around 1958–60. I had recently made a programme for the BBC, a reading with commentary of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’. The reader was Anthony Jacobs, the best in the business, and we did several such programmes together. It is hard to believe that the BBC would nowadays dream of allowing such highbrow performances. Audiences below 50,000 could not be assessed, so we could, if we chose, pretend to believe that there was a silent audience of around 49,000 Stevens enthusiasts. A few hundred would probably be nearer the truth. Many such wickedly élite programmes were made in those profligate years. Invited to address a literature seminar in Zurich, I asked if I might speak about Stevens and especially about ‘Notes’. My host, Professor Heinrich Straumann, who as a young professor had delivered the University’s oration at James Joyce’s funeral in Zurich, had not heard, or had heard very little, of Stevens, but he was adventurous and encouraged me to go ahead. I took the tapes of the broadcast with me. The students greatly enjoyed the reading, and I still remember the laugh that followed the lines . . . a kind of Swiss perfection comes And a familiar music of the machine Sets up its Schwärmerei . . . (CPP 334) I suppose they have subsequently found out more about Stevens’ idea of Switzerland. Back in London, despite encouragement from the likes of Julian Symons and Nicholas Moore (on whom Mark Ford writes so engagingly in Chapter 11 below) the reputation of Stevens was maturing slowly. There was some opposition; Larkin, increasingly influential himself, thought Stevens ‘not worth mentioning’. Stevens’ admirers were not numerous, but they were devoted and various. My friend John Wain, who as a ‘Movement’ poet and a friend of Larkin might have been expected to have little time for this alien Modernist, knew many poems of Stevens’ by heart. I remember sitting with him in a Reading pub on the day we read of the poet’s death, and being touched by the depth of his grief. That was in 1955, only two years after Faber at last published the Selected Poems. That book remains in print, unlike most of Stevens’ books. There was a xv

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rumour that Eliot was lukewarm about Stevens; this is now said, though without certainty, to be untrue, but it is certain that his firm has never been very willing to keep Stevens’ other books in print. The Selected doesn’t offer a full view of the poet (imagine Stevens without ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’ and ‘The Rock’) but for reasons unknown to me Holly Stevens’ much richer selection, The Palm at the End of the Mind, has never been published in England, and most readers, unless they can afford the Collected and the updated Opus Posthumous, are presumably still stuck with the fifty-odd-year-old and inadequate Selected. In some respects his work has been more cordially received on the Continent, as Massimo Bacigalupo testifies below (another Italian Stevensian, Nadia Fusini, has provided challenging annotated translations in book-form of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ and The Auroras of Autumn). I have a copy of a thesis on Stevens submitted for a doctorate at the University of Cracow in 1971, and no doubt many such essays were written, even in Eastern Europe, even at that time. Most of my own Stevens collection, which I liked to think probably among the best in England, was destroyed in an accident as I was moving house; but by a happy minor accident inside the greater one my copy of the Alcestis Press Ideas of Order survived the ordeal, though not in mint condition. Probably it was, perhaps it is, the only example in England. It was Stevens’ own signed copy, given to me long ago by Holly Stevens. I am wondering who I should leave it to. Much of Stevens’ poetry derives from a continuing philosophical reverie, which is what he must have had in mind when he spoke of ‘tentative ideas for the purposes of poetry’ (a phrase that, as one may see infra, caught the eye of David Haglund) and it is not surprising that critics are sometimes tempted to approach him obliquely, via another philosopher. Here we are told of a poem that may be read ‘through Blanchot’, and another to be read ‘through Husserl’. Santayana is of course an important presence, and so is Nietzsche, but one ought to consider what may be lost if Stevens is ‘read’ through them. Moreover, Stevens’ reading of philosophy was scant and essentially dilettante. For example, he omitted the very simple inquiry that would have informed him whether Heidegger lectured in French or German. In fact, his relationship with Heidegger is still almost as mysterious to me as it was when I tried to sort it out in 1980. I am grateful, therefore, to Charles Altieri and Krzysztof Ziarek for their further elucidations of such philosophical relationships in that, unlike some other commentators, they resist the temptation to present the poet as primarily an abstruse philosopher. There is room for disagreement or debate on these issues, and an important function of this book is to promote discussion. Anyway, I give it as my view, not of course shared by all or perhaps any of the contributors to this splendid book, that Stevens was, in these matters, deeply and properly self-indulgent; to forget this is to run the risk of turning him into another and less interesting

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kind of writer. His meditations bear something of the same relation to formal philosophy that his Europe bears to the real continent – a topic valuably explored in this collection by George Lensing and Robert Rehder. It does seem, as his daughter Holly remarked, that the poet came to prefer a Europe of his own construction to the real thing. And he seems always to have been convinced that America, and American poetry, had best be distinguished, or isolated, from other anglophone poetic dialects, even from the Irish, though I think he loved Ireland more than England. His epistolary friend Thomas McGreevy, wounded on the Somme in the British cause, was a Catholic Modernist who returned to Ireland from the France of Joyce and Beckett, and the London of T. S. Eliot, and spent his life among the pictures of the Dublin National Gallery – the sort of man Stevens might admire not only for his verses or for the paintings in his charge but for his idiosyncratic style, his individual relationship to Catholic philosophy and to Irish nationalism. I think Stevens had no comparable English friend. Only the most learned of admirers will fail to be enlightened by the essays that follow. If you have ever wondered how Jerome ‘begat the tubas’, you will find the best explanation in Justin Quinn’s essay. The years of obscurity when Stevens dined in Greenwich Village with Marcel Duchamp are much illuminated by David Haglund. For nuanced explanation of ‘Nuances of a Theme by Williams’ turn to Josh Cohen. Indeed, throughout this volume lovers and students of Stevens will find the learned contributors providing them with both instruction and pleasure, which are not often found together in modern criticism, and which may fuel the speculations and the research of another generation of admirers, now to be found all over the world.


Introduction: The Lights of Norway and All That Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg

A long time you have been making the trip From Havre to Hartford, Master Soleil, Bringing the lights of Norway and all that. ‘Of Hartford in a Purple Light’ To situate the quintessential Modernist poet Wallace Stevens ‘across the Atlantic’, where the lights of Norway mysteriously travel, is to place him in a realm that is at once dynamic and open-ended. Our primary aim in putting together this book is to reconsider Stevens’ development as he responds to intermingling influences from two different continents. In particular, we want to explore the nature of a poetics that may be called ‘Transatlantic’ because it is neither precisely American nor European, but involves a larger complex of literary, artistic and cultural qualities. Indeed, Stevens’ poetry, as we see it, threatens to disappear from view when discussed in simple oppositional terms of its ‘American’ qualities or its assimilations and transformations of ‘European’ subject-matter. In the language of Stevens’ own lecture ‘The Irrational Element in Poetry’, such amorphous notions as the ‘European’ and the ‘American’ are ultimately ‘too general to be serviceable’ (CPP 781). If either of these terms is to be rehabilitated in Stevens criticism, then it had better be in the reconstructed sense in which millions of Americans have implicitly defined themselves as ‘Transatlantic’: through preserving immigrant narratives, tracing genealogy (as Stevens did with his Dutch and German ancestry) or jostling different federal and state identities which seek to adapt European inheritances on American soil. When we present ‘Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic’, then (without a qualifying subtitle), we intend to honour the dynamic travel in both directions implied in our title. To our more metaphoric purpose here the Atlantic Ocean serves as a magnetic, mutually enriching and defining horizon for the cultures that have developed on either side of its expanse. It is meant to provide perspective. Moreover, oceans actively invite crossing: a notion which we would like to deploy in its full complexity. As with the ‘Twenty men crossing 1

2 Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic

a bridge / Into a village’ in Stevens’ early poem ‘Metaphors of a Magnifico’ (CPP 15–16), we should understand the word not only in its literal, physical sense but as a reference also to language’s capacities to trope and translate (see Cook 177 and Maeder 49–51). Something similar applies to the word ‘Atlantic’, which is ultimately no more than a conventional name for a reality in permanent flux. Any attempt at linguistically demarcating so fluid an entity inevitably engages in what Stevens called, in a poem that will be among the most frequently cited in this book, ‘Description Without Place’. If many another American author could be described as ‘Transatlantic’ in the sense suggested, Stevens is nevertheless a special case; and not merely because this poet did not travel abroad extensively (visiting only Canada, Cuba and parts of the Gulf of Mexico). Far more significant is the extent to which Stevens made a point of not travelling. In some sense, his was the ‘stayat-home’ mentality of Henry David Thoreau – albeit with greater ambivalence toward the ‘transcendental’ and with a modern stance obviously shaped by the international politics of his particular epoch. Yet Stevens was also uncomfortable following Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman and, in his own era, William Carlos Williams in writing in a self-consciously American grain. His work is hardly ever nativist in the sense Walter Benn Michaels has explored in his influential study Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Paradoxically, this remains the case even with the late poetry and prose which appeals more overtly to place, particularly to Connecticut. But neither was Stevens an American writer who happened to mine European art and literature and then turn his findings into something else again – something ‘homegrown’. With him the situation was more ‘complex’, in the etymological sense of that word: more entwined and folded over. He was a poet who constantly explored American and European artistic productions in order to find a voice which would be intrinsically satisfying outside and beyond immediate national contexts. Modulating upon his famous aphorism that ‘French and English constitute a single language’ (CPP 914), we might say that to Stevens Europe and America constituted a single culture, at least from the imaginative vantage of his home in Hartford, Connecticut. We might also remind ourselves of the trouble Stevens had in characterizing his American experience. His natural points of artistic reference were largely French as were the majority of the paintings he bought. His book collecting and correspondence took him considerably outside an American context as well; and his literary influences were an eclectic mix drawing on French Symbolism, British Romanticism and the American Renaissance. Time and again, the correspondence reveals Stevens both constructing and failing to realize what it means to be ‘American’ as well as what it might mean to be ‘French’, ‘Irish’ or ‘Cuban’. As he wrote to his epistolary poet-friend in Ireland, Thomas McGreevy: ‘One is so homeless over here . . . and something really American is like meeting a beautiful cousin or . . . even one’s mother

Introduction: The Lights of Norway and All That

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for the first time’ (L 626). To a poet so concerned with place and genealogy, this searching after a fleeting, provisional sense of identity – as well as the idea of living in a creative atmosphere composed out of words – became a persistent preoccupation. The effect of this preoccupation on his poetic output is plain for all to see. Any reader coming to Stevens’ work for the first time – without any advance knowledge of the poet’s life – might suppose him to have been an experienced international traveller: one of those American fin-de-siècle or Modernist émigrés who spent considerable time in Paris and elsewhere on the European continent, like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein or Hart Crane. Stevens’ poetry is chock-full of references to European places. By name, it takes us on a trip through a range of European countries: England and France, clearly, but also Ireland, Switzerland, Holland, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Poland and Bulgaria. Even Belgian grapes are mentioned – as a form of ‘fat pastiche’ (CPP 124). Within these countries, moreover, countless names of cities are dropped: not merely Paris, but other French places such as Fontainebleau, Aix, Arras, Le Havre, Avignon or Bordeaux. In Switzerland, cities like Geneva, Basel and Zurich are named. On the Italian peninsula we find Florence, Venice, Rome, Bergamo and Naples; in Spain, Madrid, Seville and Segovia; and there are further references to Stockholm, Hamburg, Athens, Vienna, Salzburg and Leyden (but not to Amsterdam, and, in Britain, little outside London: just ‘the mountainous coiffures of Bath’ [CPP 11] and some ‘Glasgow-frost’ [CPP 162]). In the same seemingly slapdash manner, Stevens’ poetry takes us along European rivers like the Danube, the Rhone, the Moldau or the Tiber. And it betrays a mild obsession with the Alps. Ever since the 1910s, when Stevens began publishing and being reviewed in the little magazines, critical responses to his work have naturally attended to the poet’s transformation of European influences, particularly French Symbolism. But for the Stevens specialist there are interesting lessons to be drawn from scanning the poetry specifically for such European place-names. There is the fact, for example, that the regular appearance of these names largely post-dates the poet’s first collection, Harmonium (1923). It becomes a staple of his writings only by the 1930s, at a time when Stevens was finally making enough money as an insurance lawyer to be able to cross the Atlantic for himself; only to realize that, in all likelihood, he would never do so. That realization, and its consequences, is of greater interest than anything else for this book. It means that what we have inherited, in the case of Wallace Stevens, is the singularly powerful literary heritage of a major Modernist poet who spent a large share of his imaginative life ‘in’ or ‘with’ places he had never been to, and ‘in’ or ‘with’ cultures he constructed entirely out of words and images (mostly from paintings and postcards). Stevens’ well-nigh obsessive interest in the imaginative construction of places lies behind several of the analyses in this book. Any Stevens lover


knows this interest to be more than a personal quirk: it allows the poet – in the indirect, self-reflective manner he favoured – to address wider notions of identity as they impact on the personal and cultural existence of every individual. As John Serio explains in his introduction to a special issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal devoted to ‘The Poetics of Place’: with Stevens any composition of place becomes ‘the essential exercise in a composition of self’ (4). To Serio the environmental determinism that limits some of the poetic ideas on place pursued in Harmonium is superseded from the mid-thirties by a new awareness on the poet’s part: ‘By seeing the relationship between people and place as a distinctively poetic process – “Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right” [CPP 913] – he modifies his ideas concerning the relationship with one’s surroundings by translating them into an active, aesthetic mode. Recognizing that “the world about us would be desolate except for the world within us” [CPP 747], he expresses the central importance of the imagination’s non-geography to the world’s geography’ (ibid.). It is precisely this dynamic interaction between the imagination’s nongeography and Transatlantic ingredients from the world’s geography which the current volume sets out to explore at different levels – some biographical and material, others more abstract, indirect or allegorical. To address a sufficiently diverse range of perspectives in situating Stevens across the Atlantic, we have chosen to divide this book – in somewhat Stevensian fashion – into three interlinking sections. The first part, ‘Descriptions without Place: Ideas of Europe in Stevens’, looks closely at the different conceptions of Europe (and, in a continually defining dialectic, of America) which we find in Stevens’ published writings. Inspired by the tactic of Stevens’ own 1945 poem ‘Description Without Place’, these chapters reflect directly on how Stevens created imaginative projections of the European continent as part of his development as a literary artist. The second, largest section of the volume, ‘Beyond Staten Island: Stevens in Transatlantic Conversation’, takes its lead from the poet’s own wistful comment that he had ‘never been closer to Europe than Staten Island’ (qtd in Brazeau 201). The types of Transatlantic dialogue covered here are subdivided into philosophical and artistic conversations, bringing together interesting new examples of the kind of comparative studies that are such a powerful staple of Stevens criticism. Here Stevens’ poetics and aesthetics are considered as part of an ongoing cross-continental conversation with specific writers and artists. These virtual interlocutors may be philosophers and theorists, visual artists or poets, figures from religious history, or a combination of such. They may serve as identifiable, likely sources of inspiration or else reveal notable affinities that manage to shed new light on the poet’s work. The third and final part (which could be expanded into a study in its own right) concerns Stevens’ reception in various European contexts. The poet’s own observation at the end of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ that ‘They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne’ (CPP 351) lends a fittingly ironic


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title to this section, which includes neither the reflections of a Sorbonne professor nor any attempt at getting Stevens unappealingly straight. Our focus, rather, is on the instructive cases of two very different British poets (the first establishing a playful and eccentric lineage that died with him, the second doing his best to downplay and repress Stevens’ influence) as well as one living Portuguese poet for whom ‘affinity’ is a more apposite term than ‘influence’; and, finally, the more palpable afterlife of Stevens’ translation into Italian and French. *** Our first chapter, George Lensing’s ‘ “The Switzerland of the Mind”: Stevens’ Invention of Europe’, opens the volume beautifully by identifying many of the issues affecting the present work. Capitalizing on Lensing’s long-standing experience as a reader of Stevens – particularly his archival work on the poet’s correspondence – Chapter 1 explores Stevens’ changing attitudes to the European continent as a poetic and actual notion with reference to the letters, the poet’s working notebooks and significant poems such as ‘The Irish Cliffs of Moher’, ‘The Novel’ and ‘A Dish of Peaches in Russia’. Lensing establishes how Stevens aimed to ‘bring Europe to himself in intimately personal ways and in ways that would have important consequences for his poetry’. J. Hillis Miller’s ‘Stevens in Connecticut (and Denmark)’ also witnesses a lifelong reader of Stevens reconsidering his sense of the poet’s overall achievement. Miller blends compelling personal testimonial with incisive close-reading and instructive comparative allusions (to Husserl, Derrida, Plato and Blanchot, among others). Chapter 2 portrays Stevens as a ‘hybrid poet, mixing the indigenous with American culture’s essential Transatlantic legacy’. Contrasting Stevens with the more nativist Williams, Miller analyses Stevens’ treatment of American place-names; focusing, in particular, on both a passage from ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ and the rich late poem ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’. The chapter reveals a Stevens who is both indigene stay-at-home and cosmopolitan in his outlook and tastes. Playfully, Miller argues of ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’: ‘This wonderful poem is scarcely intelligible to someone not from Connecticut . . . [But it is also] scarcely intelligible to a reader who is not able to place it in the context of European ideas about “the wholly other”, which it obliquely dramatizes’. In Chapter 3, ‘Stevens’ Europe: Delicate Clinkings and Total Grandeur’, Robert Rehder artfully explains how for Stevens ‘European poetry was his natural heritage as an American and a poet’ but that with ‘Europe as a place’, the poet’s relationship was necessarily imaginative. Rehder consolidates Lensing’s and Miller’s reflections in extended readings of both ‘Description Without Place’ and the masterful poem Stevens addressed to George Santayana, ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’. Significantly, both Santayana and Rome are transfigured in the architectural imagery of the poem through


which Rehder deftly explores Stevens’ complex imaginative dialogue with different places, philosophies and descriptive strategies. Indeed, Part I of the book as a whole represents the reclusive poet who spent most of his productive writing life in the small city of Hartford as arguably one of the first glocalists of the imagination: a writer who constantly read the global through the local and vice versa, convinced that these two levels are indissociable, only making sense in relation to each other. Part II, ‘Beyond Staten Island: Stevens in Transatlantic Conversation’, finds Charles Altieri asking what can still be learnt from exploring the complex relationships within Stevens’ work between ideas and words, philosophical reflections and poetic statement. Taking its lead from Edmund Husserl’s Crisis in the European Sciences, Chapter 4 argues that Stevens’ mature poetry involves a meditation on the ‘transcendentalist ego’. More especially, Altieri draws on his own extensive experience in reading Stevens to argue that ‘Husserl’s capacity to blend the transcendental and the elemental . . . helps us see what is philosophically dynamic and engaging about Stevens’ sense of the distinctive tasks his poetry had to perform’. The sense of that task is emphasized in Altieri’s analysis by his disagreement with aspects of philosopher Simon Critchley’s Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (2005). Altieri finds Critchley’s ‘model’ of reading to be ‘neither sufficiently rich in its affirmations nor sufficiently dark in its sense of tragedy to be adequate to late Stevens’. His main concern is that ‘Critchley emphasizes the situations the late poems face rather than the situatings the poems afford if we read them as exemplary acts of mind’. If Stevens criticism has already harnessed phenomenology in a variety of ways, and if Critchley’s study has proved both insightful and contentious, Krzysztof Ziarek adds to Altieri’s Husserlian account by revisiting the shadow of Martin Heidegger in the poet’s late work. Significantly, he also takes issue with the Stevens proposed by Critchley. In Chapter 5, ‘ “Without human meaning”: Stevens, Heidegger and the Foreignness of Poetry’, Ziarek provides a new reading of the late poem ‘Of Mere Being’, glossing both Heideggerian and Stevensian concerns about the limits and extent of the human. The chapter subtly argues: ‘The reality of “mere being” is indeed without human purpose and human meaning; and it becomes disclosed as such through a poietic letting-be, a release from power performed by language’. As Ziarek continues: ‘For what Critchley calls the “simple ‘there is’ of things” . . . is not there of its own, as it were, prior to the entrance of the imagination: it is in fact the very “minimal” transformation of the imagination that brings forth the “there is” of things.’ To this extent, Altieri’s and Ziarek’s chapters may be read as significant companion pieces. Justin Quinn’s ‘Early Christianity in Late Stevens’ sets a different, if not unrelated tone, to the Stevens who can be read through phenomenology. Taking its lead from the presence of St Jerome in ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, Quinn reminds us in Chapter 6 that Stevens’ relationship with


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Christianity in his later poetry (especially Transport to Summer and The Auroras of Autumn) is signally different from the attitudes to Christian faith encountered in the early work. Dispensing with the Nietzschean gaiety and poetic ‘mockery’ of Christianity in Harmonium, the later poetry makes more robust references to the influence of Christian doctrine on Western literature. Contrasting Stevens with Yeats, Quinn finds the American poet meditating on Emperor Constantine in ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ and argues that his preoccupation with ‘saints and sanctity’ enables Stevens to define himself as ‘post-Christian’. Rather than distance himself in the very act of addressing what the early Harmonium poem calls ‘A High-Toned Old Christian Woman’, Quinn claims that Stevens explores Christian icons and iconography in greater depth precisely to characterize his own post-Christian poetic experience. Josh Cohen in Chapter 7, ‘ “The strange unlike”: Stevens’ Poetics of Resemblance’, returns Stevens to idealist and phenomenological speculation, and simultaneously looks forward to the more literary conversations in the next section. His nuanced argument enlarges discussion by considering Schlegel, Blanchot, Mallarmé and Freud in conjunction with the poet. Specifically, Cohen explores the philosophical meanings and resonances across the Stevens corpus of what ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ calls ‘the essential prose’ (CPP 29). Drawing on ‘Nuances of a Theme by Williams’ and extending its reading throughout the corpus to ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ and beyond, the chapter argues that traditional concepts of ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’ are insufficient to account for Stevens’ preoccupation with the relations between literary language and an idealist ‘thing’. As Cohen argues, ‘Paradoxically, prose can manifest itself only in the guise of a poem’. Moreover, in Stevens, ‘the essential prose of “English” lives in and through the imaginative alienations of “French”’. The second half of Part II, which is devoted to more artistic conversations, opens with Chapter 8, David Haglund’s informative ‘Stevens, Duchamp and the American “ism”, 1915–1919’. Following through on Cohen, Haglund explores Stevens’ concept of his own poetic career as represented in ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’. Contrasting the gestures made by Stevens and Duchamp toward an ‘American art’ or ‘American identity’, the chapter discusses Stevens’ playful relationship with various ‘isms’ and the manifestoaesthetics of early Modernism. For Haglund, Stevens is sceptical about an ‘Americanist’ literature and his poetic project is clearly differentiated from that of William Carlos Williams. Haglund also reads Stevens’ ‘Primordia’ and ‘Pecksniffiana’ sequences, focusing especially on ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, as instructive instances of the poet’s battle with American soil and an emergent poetic. Edward Ragg turns to the middle and mature phases of Stevens’ career in Chapter 9, ‘Picasso, Cézanne and Stevens’ Abstract Engagements’. He sets out to demonstrate how the poet overcame his 1930s reservations about


abstraction and argues that the examples of Picasso and Cézanne galvanized Stevens’ acceptance of the advantages of an abstract aesthetic. Focusing on significant moments in ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ – a poem Ragg suggests ‘critiques the very abstraction it also embraces’ – the essay analyses Picasso’s effect on that poem as well as the presence of Cézanne in ‘Prelude to Objects’. The essay presents a Stevens who unashamedly turns to an abstract poetic because of its restorative human powers rather than marking a retreat into a world of the imagination. Indeed, the paradox of an abstract engagement informs the analysis of Stevens’ Transatlantic gestures throughout his career. The chapters by Haglund and Ragg, which reconsider Stevens’ dialogue with European visual artists, are followed in turn by a chapter revisiting connections with a specific European writer. Lisa Goldfarb’s ‘Music and the Vocal Poetics of Stevens and Valéry’ offers a discussion of the still underappreciated relationship between Stevens and his French contemporary Paul Valéry. Goldfarb’s aim in Chapter 10 is to bring the vocal poetics of Valéry to a reading of Stevens’ work. After presenting the contours of Valéry’s vocal poetics, drawing from his many essays and voluminous notebooks, Goldfarb turns to Valéryan echoes in Stevens’ prose, to highlight how his essays, letters and ‘Adagia’ call forth the shaping structure of Valéry’s more extensive theory. She ends by discussing a number of Stevens’ poems – most notably ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, ‘Variations on a Summer Day’, ‘The Creations of Sound’ and ‘Large Red Man Reading’ – to show how Stevens breathes life into their shared poetics of voice. According to Goldfarb, when we read Stevens’ work with Valéry’s theory in mind, we hear each poet’s voice more accurately and fully, and feel Valéry’s presence in Stevens’ poetic world. Part III, ‘Getting It Straight at the Sorbonne? Stevens’ Afterlife in Europe’, opens with Mark Ford’s colourful investigation of the biographical and poetic links between Stevens and the English poet Nicholas Moore; as well as, through this connection, of Stevens’ dealings with the Fortune Press. One of the brightest young stars in the London poetry firmament of the 1940s and a widely published writer in the United States for a while, the charmingly eccentric Moore flew off the radar in the ensuing decades only to die in complete obscurity. Ford offers a vivid, genial and at times hilarious portrait of the man’s life and endlessly inventive work, which would bring him into contact with Stevens, the Modernist poet whom he admired most and actively sought to launch to a British readership. Thus Chapter 11 also tells the wonderful story of the Fortune Press and its shady founder, R. A. Caton, with cameo appearances by Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and the highly exotic Tambimuttu. It is a story that usefully reminds us of the crucial, at times volatile and unpredictable, role of ‘middle men’ in the establishment of a poet’s reputation and his ultimate canonization. Gareth Reeves in Chapter 12, ‘A Ghost Never Exorcized: Stevens in the Poetry of Charles Tomlinson’, tells a very different, more earnest story of


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a poet who instead of insouciantly emulating his Transatlantic forebear ambivalently struggled with him. Although Tomlinson is widely regarded as one of the most ‘Americanized’ of the British poets to come to prominence in the twenty or so years following the Second World War, his relationship with American poetry, Reeves argues, is not easy to categorize. His poetry is haunted by the contradictions inherent in American poetic Modernism, summed up as the Symbolist tendencies of Stevens on the one hand and the Imagism of Williams on the other. The common view of Tomlinson, fostered by the poet himself, is that an early, mistaken allegiance to Stevens gave way to a more fruitful reading of Williams. But the picture Reeves offers is less simple and more fascinating: for one way of looking at Tomlinson’s poetic career is as an attempt to exorcize the ghost of Stevens. If, in the case of Moore and Tomlinson, we are clearly talking of the direct influence exerted by Stevens on a younger generation of Transatlantic poets, this is altogether different in the case study presented by Irene Ramalho Santos. Chapter 13, ‘A Poetics of Ignorance: António Ramos Rosa and Stevens’, offers the first extended investigation of the prominent Portuguese poet Ramos Rosa’s work in conjunction with Stevens’ aesthetics. The essay argues that rather than see Ramos Rosa as explicitly responding to Stevens (with whose poetry he claims to be only vaguely familiar), the later poet gathers inspiration from a ‘poetics of ignorance’ in which Ramos Rosa’s acquaintance with Stevens is a cannily ‘unknowing’ catalyst for his own work. Ramalho Santos’ suave chapter is interested more in understanding what she calls ‘constellations of poets’ based on a shared aesthetic affinity and a joint resistance to poetry’s colonization by philosophy than in tracing direct intertextual genealogies. Such constellations offer extended possibilities for critical exploration, as she briefly illustrates with the further example of the Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros. Finally, Chapter 14, Massimo Bacigalupo’s insightful and good-humoured ‘Reading Stevens in Italian’, rounds up the academic chapters in this volume by looking at another mode through which Stevens has been crossing the Atlantic: through the efforts of translators to let him be heard in other languages. Bacigalupo’s own experience as an award-winning translator (not just of Stevens but of several other major poets) allows him to survey the rich translation history of Stevens in Italy and to testify to the multiple joys and frustrations of translating this particular poet. Working through a closely considered study of lapses, slips and miscomprehensions, he shows us how translators of Stevens, in their own indirect ways, are important critics too, who present us with their proper mix of blindness and insight. His discussion is all the more rewarding for drawing not only on his own translations but on those of Italian colleagues as well as recent French versions by Claire Malroux. Bacigalupo wraps up his caressingly detailed investigation with various passages from ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’, thus returning one final time

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to a poem already held up for inspection by several other contributors to the volume. While the academic chapters may thus be said to have come full circle, we are pleased to be able to append a visually attractive coda as a concluding instance of Stevens’ Transatlantic afterlife. This time, however, the crossings involved are also generic: the personal testimonial offered by Helga Kos is that of a visual artist from Amsterdam who learnt of Stevens first through the musical transposition of seven late poems by famous American composer (and author) Ned Rorem, to which in turn she was invited to provide a painter’s response. What was originally intended as a relatively circumscribed, short-lived assignment ran out of hand as Kos became mesmerized by Stevens’ powerful appeal as an image-maker. The result was a happily obsessive five-year adventure that ended with a three-volume ‘artist’s book’ which we have tried to evoke, however imperfectly, through a series of colour reproductions. Ideally, however, the book itself, as Kos explains, should be experienced – like Rorem’s music – in time, thus presenting us with an appropriate concluding image for a study of Stevens that is especially interested in the open-ended act of finding what crossings will suffice.

Works cited Brazeau, Peter. Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered: An Oral Biography. New York: Random House, 1983. Cook, Eleanor. Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Critchley, Simon. Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. London: Routledge, 2005. Maeder, Beverly. Wallace Stevens’ Experimental Language: The Lion in the Lute. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Serio, John N. ‘Introduction: A Personal Reflection’. The Wallace Stevens Journal 27.1 (Spring 2003): 3–6. Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997.

Part I Descriptions without Place: Ideas of Europe in Stevens


1 ‘The Switzerland of the Mind’: Stevens’ Invention of Europe George Lensing

Why did Stevens, loving Europe as he did, never visit there? And what did it mean to him as a poet that he didn’t? We know that as early as 1923, Stevens and his wife were able to make a leisurely sea voyage through the Panama Canal, and, on other occasions, he went on to vacation in places like Florida and Maine. He also made a couple of brief visits to Cuba. Eventually, he had the means financially to make a journey across the Atlantic, even as he was able to and did purchase paintings from an art dealer in Paris, carvings and jewellery from Ceylon, and other artefacts from other countries. To the poet for whom ‘life is an affair of places’ instead of ‘people’ (CPP 901), one might expect a visit to Europe to beckon him commandingly. In addressing these questions, I want first to outline the passion for Europe that Stevens indulged throughout his adult lifetime in correspondence, notebooks and poetry. Secondly, one can only speculate that, at some point in his middle age, perhaps earlier, he realized that it was unlikely he would ever visit Europe or any of the other distant continents. That being the case, he proceeded to explore ways in which he could bring Europe to himself in intimately personal ways and in ways that would have important consequences for his poetry. Two entries in one of his working notebooks ably serve as illustrations of important premises that became part of Stevens’ larger poetics: ‘Poetry As The Switzerland Of The Mind’ and ‘The Alp at the end of the street’ (FPof P 184 and 167). In the end, Europe was only a ‘Switzerland Of The Mind’ or an ‘Alp at the end of [his] street’ – an intrinsically different Europe, but a construct of immense and enduring importance and pleasure to the poet – a unique description without place. The final entry in the same notebook entitled ‘From Pieces of Paper’ is ‘One Must Sit Still To Discover The World’ (FPof P 188). We know that during his three years at Harvard, Stevens studied French and German languages and literature, as well as British literature. These, in fact, made up the core of his curriculum there. He majored, one might say, in European languages and literature. Later, in one of his ‘Adagia’, he would affirm that ‘French and English constitute a single language’ (CPP 914). Then, 13

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Descriptions without Place

at the age of 20, resolving to leave the university without completing a degree, Stevens confided in his journal his plans for the future: ‘I am going to New York, I think, to try my hand at journalism. If that does not pan out well, I am resolved to knock about the country – the world’ (SP 70). After beginning his tenure as a reporter at the New York Tribune, he was dreaming just a few months later, ‘I hope to get to Paris next summer – and I mean to if I have the money’ (SP 90), and, back in New York having spent Christmas in Reading, he had not abandoned his plan: ‘I am likely to remain here until Spring, at least. Europe is still on the other side of the ocean’ (SP 94). Because of straitened financial circumstances in the ensuing months and years, it remained on the other side of the ocean. In 1904, Elsie Kachel entered his life, though the two were not wed until 1909. In one letter to her during the engagement, he indulged again in his dream: Bernard Shaw has just brought out a new thing in London called ‘The Admirable Bashville.’ There is no scenery and the actors act in their everyday clothes. It is a burlesque of Shakespeare, I believe. – Wouldn’t it be nice to live in London and go – say, on Saturday evening? We’ll be going over there one of these days, I hope. – I should mope in Paradise (possibly) if I were to die without first having been to London. – On Sunday, it was Berlin. – I have had my hours for Paris, too. – When I could see the Street of Little Stables, and the Street of Beautiful Leaves, and the Bridge of Arts, and the Church of Our Lady, and the Arch of Triumph – as clearly as I can see you looking out of that frame. – Good Fortune, send us to them all. We’ll save for that. It isn’t so impossibly expensive, you know. People who go once go often. . . . It seems much nearer, too, when the steamers start from the foot of your own street, as they do here. (CS 141) It is noteworthy that Stevens has already visited these locations mentally – last Sunday in Berlin and ‘I have had my hours for Paris, too’. His letter speaks of a certain familiarity with Paris, resulting, we might speculate, from his reading, photographs or, more likely, his own interior constructions. But those interior visitations still anticipate the real London, the real Berlin, the real Paris. ‘We’ll be going over there one of these days, I hope’, and with something like adolescent plangency: ‘I should mope in Paradise (possibly) if I were to die without first having been to London.’ Six months later, his longing for London was unabated as he noted in his journal: ‘London continues to be the ultimate point of romance to me. I wish there was some chap there to whom I could write for things’ (CS 141). Here, at the age of 29, Stevens for the first time expresses the alternative of bringing Europe to himself by finding a ‘chap’ who could arrange to send him

Stevens’ Invention of Europe 15

‘things’. He had thereby discovered a strategy that would remain intact for the remainder of his life. By the time his poem ‘Autumn Refrain’ appeared in 1932, the music of the European nightingale with all its Keatsian evocations had become purely imaginary: ‘Though I have never – shall never hear that bird’ (CPP 129). At the age of 54, he mentioned in a letter, ‘For my part, I never really lived until I had a home, and my own room, say, with a package of books from Paris or London’ (L 301). The letter to James Powers is noteworthy because it establishes the terms of a certain compromise Stevens has made. First he needs the security of his own home and the privacy of his own room as a condition for enjoying the package of books. Europe, so to speak, has become domestic and solitary. Lacking all these circumstances, he explains, he ‘never really lived’. For some reason, and this is an anomaly in Stevens’ responses to Europe, he found in 1951 a visitor from Sweden irksome: On Saturday, a visitor from Sweden, a very pleasant and intelligent person, came to the house. We had an agreeable talk. He was well mannered, but he reeked of tobacco smoke. He also reeked of Swedish poetry and when he finished his call he left with me a book of Swedish songs with their scores and, in addition, an anthology of Swedish poetry translated into English. Now, I have not the slightest desire to sing Swedish songs correctly or incorrectly and at the moment a Swedish anthology is the last thing in the world that I should ever look at. This is simply typical of the sort of thing that runs one ragged. (L 712) It must have been at this time that he entered into his notebook of proposed titles the following: ‘Shrinking From Sweden’ (FPofP 171). Switzerland, on the other hand, held out a greater appeal. To José Rodríguez Feo he wrote in 1948, ‘But, suddenly, I began to think about Switzerland. There is a great deal coming from Switzerland. Then, too, Switzerland is something that one ought to think about in the summertime. It is so much more agreeable to think about Lake Geneva at this time of the year than it is to think about the rue de Babylone, nicht wahr?’ (L 594). Two years later, he was still thinking of that country, saying to Bernard Heringman, ‘I assume that you will see something of Switzerland, which has been everywhere in my mind recently’ (L 665). In the notebook of titles, he wrote out ‘Poetry As The Switzerland Of The Mind’, ‘A Sudden Importance of Switzerland’ and ‘Swiss Widow’ (FPof P 184, 185, 178). In many ways, Stevens’ correspondence became his passport to Europe and other countries and continents – Ireland through Thomas McGreevy; France through his art dealer, Anatole Vidal, and, after Vidal’s death, his daughter Paule. A poem like ‘Our Stars Come from Ireland’ is the direct result of two

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poems by McGreevy, who was Director of the National Gallery in Dublin and whom Stevens knew almost solely by correspondence. McGreevy’s poems recollect his youth in the town of Tarbert near Mal Bay, locations that are prominently drawn into Stevens’ poem. Another postcard with a photograph of the Irish Cliffs of Moher in County Clare came from the director of the Lamont Library poetry room at Harvard, John Sweeney, who was vacationing there. In a later letter, Stevens acknowledged that the photograph ‘eventually became a poem’ (L 770), the one called ‘The Irish Cliffs of Moher’. On yet another occasion, Stevens was also quite taken with the account written by his lively Cuban correspondent José Rodríguez Feo about an Argentine writer who suffered through a bitterly cold Parisian winter. That story led to Rodríguez Feo’s decision to decline the offer of a job with UNESCO in Paris. Here is Rodríguez Feo’s letter: I gave up the job at the Unesco at Paris because mother was afraid I would freeze in the Parisian hotels. She happened to listen in on a conversation wherein a friend of mine described in gruesome details the fate of an Argentine writer. At night he would go to bed, cover himself with blankets – protruding from the pile of wool a hand, in a black glove, holds a novel by Camus. That was the only safe way he could keep in touch with French literary events. Mother was much impressed by the picture of the engloved hand holding a trembling little volume. She begged me to stay away. (L 617) This episode of the Parisian winter and the Argentine writer was made into Stevens’ poem ‘The Novel’, coming, as he later told Rodríguez Feo, ‘from one of your letters to me’ (L 687). In the spring and summer of 1949, Stevens was writing ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ and, in canto XXVIII, he incorporated several letters and postcards from friends in Europe. Here is the first part of the canto: If it should be true that reality exists In the mind: the tin plate, the loaf of bread on it, The long-bladed knife, the little to drink and her Misericordia, it follows that Real and unreal are two in one: New Haven Before and after one arrives or, say, Bergamo on a postcard, Rome after dark, Sweden described, Salzburg with shaded eyes Or Paris in conversation at a café. (CPP 414)


Many years ago, while doing archival research at the Huntington Library, I discovered the sources for these references. ‘Rome after dark’ had come from a recent postcard sent by McGreevy describing his nights in Rome. Stevens responded, ‘Your postcard from Rome set me up. Rome is not ordinarily on the itinerary of my imagination. It is a little out of the way, covered by cypresses. It is not a place that one visits frequently like Paris or Dublin’ (L 629). ‘Sweden described’ (the country toward which his sympathies had apparently softened) came from a woman named Ebba Dalin, an American married to a Swedish-American engineer; she had sent several pictures of Stockholm with an invitation to visit. More recently, Barbara Church, widow of Stevens’ friend Henry Church, sent him a succession of postcards and notes throughout the summer of 1949, including a postcard from Stockholm in June. She also provided the description of ‘Paris in conversation at a café’ after her visit there in July. ‘Bergamo on a postcard’ also came from Mrs Church later that month. In retrospect, one can appreciate the importance of these hastily scrawled messages that made their way through the mails to Hartford. Here is a kind of vicarious identity with the poet’s friends and their travels; the notes and cards personalized for him a connection to European cities otherwise left to his imagination. In the late summer of 1950, for example, he wrote to Mrs Church that he had ‘looked forward to a particularly busy summer running around all over Europe (in other people’s shoes) because there are quite a number of people over there this summer’ (L 689). Three summers later he wrote to her again, ‘The postcards from Ville d’Avray came the other day. They did me a lot of good. In fact, I survive on postcards from Europe’ (L 797). Stevens also survived on postcards and other items from Europe by merging an image of remote cities and lands with the immediacy of his own familiar surroundings. In this way, the foreign and the familiar came to depend upon each other, at times evoking a form of creative tension and at other times a harmonious convergence. A purely Stevensian comparison between Hayden mangoes on his table at Hartford and a description of ‘blue and white Munich’ three years after the bombings of that city in the Second World War came together for Stevens as a result of a letter from Mrs Church in the German city: We have on a table in the dining room at home several Hayden mangoes. What healthy looking things they are. A friend who has been to Munich this summer wrote to me the other day of the extent of the destruction of ‘blue and white Munich’. It is like changing records on a gramophone to speak of the red and almost artificial green of mango skins and then speak of blue and white Munich. But unless we do these things to reality, the damned thing closes in us, walls us up and buries us alive. After all, as you spend your summer getting well again, aren’t you in an extraordinary

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position to carry on the struggle with and against reality and against the fifth column of reality that keeps whispering with the hard superiority of the sane that reality is all we have, that it is that or nothing. Reality is the footing from which we leap after what we do not have and on which everything depends. (L 599–600) This remarkable letter makes clear that Stevens lived his poetics of the imagination in his own domestic, quotidian life brightened with something as casual as a reference to the recently bombed city of Munich as ‘blue and white’. On another occasion some newspaper wrappings from Paris containing photographs of the city of Aix-en-Provence conjured in his inner ear the sound of a fountain. Such sounds then merged with the cooing of a dove he had encountered walking to the office: Some books came recently wrapped in a Paris newspaper which contained photos of some fountains at Aix, not great things, but enough to make a little sound as one walked by. This makes me think of a little dove that was sitting high upon a wire near home a few mornings ago cooing about nothing much. I stopped to look at her. She turned around so that she could see me better but went right on with her talk. (L 610) The convergences of ‘blue and white Munich’ with the Hayden mangoes on the table and the photos of the ‘fountains at Aix’ with the cooing dove in Hartford display the kinds of syntheses by which Stevens constructed many of his poems. More specifically, they show how Europe had become the richly evocative and constant landscape of his imagination directly attached to the immediate world as he knew it. Stevens’ correspondence, providing him with ready materia poetica from postcards and letters, is perhaps not his most significant absorption of the European influence on his work. I am suggesting that, in a more fundamental way, the unattainability of Europe, leaving the poet disappointed but later ruefully resigned, became itself an endemic quality of many of his poems. The theme of desire and longing for a world outside the self, but attempting to possess it nonetheless with one’s own interior resources and reserves, is of course foundational to his poetry. The world outside the self could be sun, sea, field, star – but it could also be Europe itself. I want to look briefly at an enigmatic poem called ‘A Dish of Peaches in Russia’ as an illustration of Europe-as-world, or Europe-as-reality. Then, I will look to the final canto of ‘Description Without Place’ as Stevens’ compensatory and placating possession of Europe-as-world.


‘A Dish of Peaches in Russia’ is a highly sensuous poem about the pleasures deriving from the sight, smell, feel and taste of peaches in their rich summer ripeness. ‘With my whole body I taste these peaches, / I touch them and smell them’ (CPP 206), the poem begins. But the peaches are not just any peaches; their satisfactions relate in a peculiar way to one’s native origins, one’s identity with one’s native land. The speaker in the poem, a Russian, delights in the peaches the way that ‘the Angevine / Absorbs Anjou’, the way ‘the black Spaniard plays his guitar’. His delight is partially but not completely successful. In the end, he is, in fact, an alien among the peaches: ‘But it must be that I, / That animal, that Russian, that exile, for whom // The bells of the chapel pullulate sounds at / Heart.’ At the same time, the exiled Russian finds the peaches ‘full of the colors of my village / And of fair weather, summer, dew, peace’. But peace is not his at the end of the poem. He emerges finally as a divided self. These peaches are like Russian peaches; even the title declares ‘A Dish of Peaches in Russia’. But the ‘peace’ of the Russian’s homeland gives way to the ‘ferocities’ of his exile, perhaps in Anjou itself or Spain. Here is how the poem concludes, a sharp reversal: Even the drifting of the curtains, Slight as it is, disturbs me. I did not know That such ferocities could tear One self from another, as these peaches do. One self is divided from the other – a Russian of Russia and a Russian in exile from Russia – even though the peaches themselves almost allow him to escape such painful division. The poem perhaps has a bearing upon the issue of Stevens’ relation to Europe. It is a poem about a Frenchman, a Spaniard and a Russian. The first two are one with their native origins. The third, the Russian, is an exile. Among other possible readings, I want to suggest that the Russian is related to a Stevens who himself remained exiled from absorbing Anjou like an Angevine, or, for that matter, like an American. The Russian exile is an exile in Europe; Stevens is an exile from Europe. Such ‘ferocities’ of separation for Stevens also came at a personal cost, a sense of loss, a divided self, a hunger for the peaches of Europe that remained the forbidden fruit of a distant land. What redeemed Stevens from the provincialism of a circumscribed life in New England was an innate curiosity and sensibility that made him, in fact, the least provincial of poets. Through his magazine subscriptions, his books and his correspondence, including a large assortment of artefacts mailed to him from around the world, he became one of our most cosmopolitan poets. In a more personal way, he could truthfully say, ‘I survive on postcards from Europe’. In the end, he could ‘Sit Still To Discover The World’.

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When he was beginning to write his poem ‘Description Without Place’, Stevens wrote to Henry Church, a wealthy editor and sponsor of the arts who lived as much in France as in the United States (in some ways a kind of Stevens alter ego): ‘I have only one piece of news, and that is that I am going to read a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard next June [1945]. I am about to settle down to my subject: DESCRIPTION WITHOUT PLACE. . . . It seems to me to be 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. This ought to be a good subject for such an occasion’ (L 494). If our knowledge of the world is always its seeming, we are always, like the Russian in ‘A Dish of Peaches in Russia’, exiles from that world. If, in the words of ‘A Collect of Philosophy’, ‘we never see the world except the moment after’ (CPP 857), then the separation of the eye from its object can be distanced by a few inches or by the Atlantic Ocean itself. Europe, like all other objects, is necessarily the seeming of it. I believe this is what Stevens is saying in the final canto of ‘Description Without Place’. Here, thinking of Spain, he speaks of ‘The invention of a nation in a phrase’, as if by the act of naming he created it. After acknowledging that ‘the word is the making of the world’, he presents the Spanish hidalgo: the hard hidalgo Lives in the mountainous character of his speech; And in that mountainous mirror Spain acquires The knowledge of Spain and of the hidalgo’s hat – A seeming of the Spaniard, a style of life, The invention of a nation in a phrase. (CPP 302) In ‘The World as Meditation’, Penelope’s passionate longing for the return of Ulysses yields to her mind his visionary presence in the motions of the sun. ‘It was Ulysses and it was not’ (CPP 442), the poem concludes. And so it is with Stevens’ lifelong romance with Europe. The presence of that continent, and the many countries that perpetually fascinated him, was and was not. The seeming of Europe was his seeing of it. In a letter written two years before his death, Stevens admits to a preference for his personal, fictitious Paris: ‘I am one of the many people around the world who live from time to time in a Paris that has never existed and that is composed of the things that other people, primarily Parisians themselves, have said about Paris. That particular Paris communicates an interest in life that may be wholly fiction, but, if so, it is precious fiction’ (L 773). In another letter written about a year later, more than a half-century after


his earliest resolves to visit there, he again set forth the great and enduring appeal of his fictitious invention. Here, unlike the Russian exile, he has escaped the ‘ferocities’ of the alienated self. Like Penelope yearning for Ulysses, there is a mixture of pathos and triumph: ‘I have often seen Seville before but never smelled the heavy fragrance of its orange blossoms. And I have seen Granada but never felt the noise of its mountain water. Also, I have been in Madrid but this time it was a change to get away from the Prado and to go to restaurants and sit by the door and look out at the 18th century. I liked to stop in Bordeaux where other friends of mine have lived’ (L 837). In the end, perhaps Stevens came to prefer his private Europe over its actual presence. Holly Stevens hints of this in her remark about why her father never visited Europe: ‘I think my father always thought that he would get to Europe someday. As a young man he couldn’t afford it, and later he was married to someone who was a terrible traveler and constantly carsick or seasick whenever she went anywhere. After the war I think he was afraid of finding things too much changed. By that point, of course, he had constructed his own Europe’ (qtd in Mee 48). Just two years before his death, Stevens had the satisfaction of seeing his own poems collected and published in the United Kingdom. When Faber published his Selected Poems, it was with the assistance of T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore. Ironically, a second Selected Poems, a pirated edition from the Fortune Press, was published in that country one year before, though this edition was suppressed and its copies confiscated. Faber would go on to publish Stevens’ essays and letters. It seems that his work had found a location in Europe in spite of the poet’s personal distance. Even so, in the half-century since the publication of Faber’s Selected Poems, and with notable exceptions, Stevens’ work remains largely unknown in Britain. Stevens himself foresaw part of the difficulty: ‘The truth is American poetry is at its worst in England and, possibly in Ireland or in any other land where English is spoken and whose inhabitants feel that somehow our English is a vulgar imitation’ (L 597). One could argue that as a poet Stevens benefited from the long denial of Europe – however difficult it was for him to forgo the journey itself. Europe became part of his sensibility, a synecdoche for the larger world he never tired of pursuing, an idealized geography, a paradise unvisited but not ungained. One of the entries in ‘From Pieces of Paper’ is this: ‘I Was Born In Europe’ (FPof P 177). In a sense, one could say he also died there. ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’ is Stevens’ meditation on the final days of George Santayana dying in a convent in Rome in 1952 – three years before his own death. Friends from Stevens’ Harvard years more than a half-century earlier, both Spanish philosopher and American poet cling to the presence of that threshold city at the end. For Santayana in Rome but also for Stevens in Hartford, a poet’s imagined Rome offers the ultimate consolation: ‘The sounds drift in.

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The buildings are remembered. / The life of the city never lets go, nor do you / Ever want it to. It is part of the life in your room’ (CPP 434).

Works cited Mee, Suzi. ‘The Double Life of Wallace Stevens’. Harvard Magazine 82 (Sept.–Oct. 1979): 45–8. Stevens, Holly. Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1977. Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966. Stevens, Wallace. ‘From Pieces of Paper’. In George S. Lensing, Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986. 166–200. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. Stevens, Wallace. The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie. Ed. J. Donald Blount. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006.

2 Stevens in Connecticut (and Denmark) J. Hillis Miller

My testimony in this chapter is more American than Transatlantic. I first began to read Wallace Stevens seriously when I was a graduate student at Harvard from 1948 to 1952. I bought, and still have, the separate volumes of his poems, available one by one before the Collected Poems appeared. Though I did not read William Carlos Williams seriously until much later, when I was writing Poets of Reality, I heard both Stevens and Williams give readings at Harvard around 1950. I remember the powerful ‘Blouagh!’ Williams enunciated when he read ‘The Sea Elephant’. I remember also seeing him after the reading getting into a shabby car. This was, I supposed, the sort of car a family doctor in Rutherford, New Jersey, was likely to drive. Stevens I remember as austere and distant, ‘tall and of a port in air’, like that jar in Tennessee (CPP 61). Richard Wilbur, who seemed fragile and slight beside Stevens, introduced him. Though I suppose Stevens was not really wearing high-button shoes and a celluloid collar, he might as well have been. He looked like an overweight insurance executive, which he was. I remember he read ‘Credences of Summer’ (‘Now in midsummer come and all fools slaughtered’ [CPP 322]) and ‘Large Red Man Reading’ (‘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’ [CPP 365]). As the hour went on, Stevens got more and more carried away by his own poetry. His voice got softer and softer, more and more inward, until only those in the first two or three rows, where I happened to be, could hear him. People in the back started leaving, but he paid no attention. Nor did he pay any attention to the loud ambulances and fire engines going by on Mount Auburn Street behind him, bells clanging and sirens wailing. He went right on reading, more and more quietly, absorbed in the sound of his own words. That last phrase echoes the title of the first essay in Stevens’ The Necessary Angel: ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’. My effort, in all the earnest reading I did at that time of Stevens’ work, was to make sense of it, to figure out what it meant, and why in the world he wrote in the way he did. That is, I suppose, what graduate students in English 23

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were expected to do in those long ago days. My reading of Stevens, like my reading of philosophy and literary theory at that time, was, however, on the side, secret, private and somewhat furtive. I was supposed to be, and was, more or less, a Victorianist writing a dissertation on Dickens. A good bit of one’s most important reading, mine at least, is likely to be like that: amateur and unprofessional, even a little guilty. I should nevertheless have perhaps paid more attention to that phrase: ‘the sound of words’. Stevens does not say the meaning of words, or even the force of words, is central in poetry. He says the sound of words, as we say ‘the sound of music’. It was only much later, and gradually, that I began to cherish the sound of Stevens’ poetry for its own sake and to murmur over to myself like incantations certain lines where the sound of the words exceeds, or almost exceeds, their sense. ‘Poetry’, says Stevens in one of the ‘Adagia’, ‘must resist the intelligence almost successfully’ (CPP 910). ‘In Hydaspia, by Howzen / Lived a lady, Lady Lowzen, / For whom what is was other things’ (CPP 243). ‘Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan / Of tan with henna hackles, halt!’ (CPP 60). ‘Poet, be seated at the piano. / Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo, / Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic, / Its envious cachinnation’ (CPP 107). ‘Under the eglantine / The fretful concubine / Said, “Phooey! Phoo!” / She whispered, “Pfui!” // The demi-monde / On the mezzanine / Said, “Phooey!” too, / And a “Hey-de-i-do!” ’ (CPP 191). ‘What more is there to love than I have loved? / And if there be nothing more, O bright, O bright, / The chick, the chidderbarn and grassy chives // And great moon, cricket-impresario, / And, hoy, the impopulous purple-plated past, / Hoy, hoy, the blue bulls kneeling down to rest. // Chome! clicks the clock, if there be nothing more’ (CPP 234). Such lines not only resist the intelligence, they also resist commentary – almost successfully. Full commentary would be possible, but lengthy and tedious, like trying to explain a joke. As opposed to his friend William Carlos Williams, who was a resolutely American poet, Wallace Stevens was more cosmopolitan. On the one hand, many of Stevens’ most beautiful poems are ‘in the American grain’, at least in the sense that their mise en scène is American or that they lovingly employ American place-names, often Native American ones, as in ‘The wood-doves are singing along the Perkiomen’ (‘Thinking of a Relation Between the Images of Metaphors’ [CPP 310]), or ‘Damariscotta da da doo’ (‘Variations on a Summer Day’ [CPP 215]), or the ‘thin men of Haddam’ (‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ [CPP 75]), or ‘thought-like Monadnocks’ (‘This Solitude of Cataracts’ [CPP 366]), or ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’. The Perkiomen is the name of a small river in the Pennsylvania Dutch country where Stevens was born. ‘Dutch’ of course was American for ‘Deutsch’, so often today this group is called, more properly, ‘Pennsylvania German’. Damariscotta is the name of a small town on the coast of Maine. Haddam is a village on the Connecticut River. The last item in my list is the title of the next to last poem in Stevens’ Collected Poems. Haddam is mentioned in that poem too. This

Stevens in Connecticut (and Denmark)

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wonderful poem is scarcely intelligible to someone not from Connecticut, at least not without a lot of footnotes. On the other hand, that poem is also scarcely intelligible to a reader who is not able to place it in the context of European ideas about ‘the wholly other’, which it obliquely dramatizes. An equally long list could be made of non-American place-names, wines, painters, writers, citations, foreign words and phrases, and so on, that appear in Stevens’ poems. Stevens subscribed to the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. ‘Monadnocks’ can be taken as a reference to Leibniz, as well as the plural of a name for a special kind of US ‘mountain or rocky mass that has resisted erosion and stands isolated in a plain or peneplain’ (American Heritage Dictionary 847a). The word comes from the name ‘Mt Monadnock’ in New Hampshire, near which philosopher William James spent his summers. The phrase is odd. It does not say that thoughts are like mountains, but that mountains are like thoughts, at least in this poem, and as a name for the ‘ruffling’ reflections in the lake in the poem (CPP 366). The poem turns solid external objects, like those monadnocks that punctuate the New England countryside, into thoughts, as anything reflected in a lake is dematerialized. Indeed, Leibniz does this by internalizing the external world as reflections within my private monad. This poem, in its echo of Heraclitus, anticipates, as a sort of trial run, the much later ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’, discussed in detail below. ‘This Solitude of Cataracts’ begins: ‘He never felt twice the same about the flecked river, / Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing // Through many places, as if it stood still in one . . .’ (CPP 366). Stevens kept up with the French philosophy of his time. He apparently knew something of German phenomenology in that way. He read Jean Wahl, for example. Stevens’ use of the term ‘idea’, as in ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, is more Husserlian than Platonic. Stevens collected French paintings. European places and persons often figure in his poems, even though he had never been to Europe, as in a reference to ‘Nietzsche in Basel’ (‘Description Without Place’ [CPP 299]), or in an eloquent stanza in ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ about Danes in Denmark: ‘We were as Danes in Denmark all day long’ (CPP 361). I shall discuss that stanza later. We know from withdrawal records in the Hartford public library that Stevens read a lot of Nietzsche, in the old Thomas Common translation, or at least took the books out of the local library. Juxtaposing close attention to two poems I have mentioned is a good way to see the mixture of indigene stay-at-home and cosmopolitan in Stevens’ work. First the ‘indigene’ poem.1 ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’ is the next to last poem in Stevens’ Collected Poems. It is a poem written in the poet’s old age, when he lived in the shadow of death. Death is named in the poem by way of references to the River Styx of Greek mythology. Stevens calls the realm of the dead ‘Stygia’, hardly a Connecticut place-name. Nevertheless, the poem is rooted in local idiom, in local culture and in local topography near the city of Hartford, where Stevens lived. According to the official website of

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the State of Connecticut (www.ct.gov), the name ‘Connecticut’ comes from the Native American (Mohegan) word ‘Quinnehtukqut’ meaning ‘Long River Place’ or ‘Beside the Long Tidal River’. Stevens’ title appears, at least at first, to refer to the Connecticut River, which bisects the state of Connecticut. The poem also names two towns near the Connecticut River, Farmington and Haddam. Both towns have beautiful late eighteenth- or early nineteenthcentury white-painted clapboard homes, churches and civic buildings, in a serenely decorous and harmonious style called ‘Greek Revival’. That style is one of the great triumphs of American architecture. A careful reading of the poem indicates, however, that the river of rivers in Connecticut names not the Connecticut River, but an invisible ubiquitous river, neither transcendent nor immanent, definitely not an idealist transcendental, not an ‘idea’ in the Platonic sense, but a river that ‘flows nowhere, like a sea’, more akin to what Husserl means by ‘idea’, though it would be a long river to follow in order to demonstrate the complexities of that Transatlantic connection. The river of rivers in Connecticut is ‘A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction’ (my italics). It flows (‘curriculum’) and it has power (‘vigor’), but it is as much local as Haddam or Farmington. This ‘river’ is Stevens’ version of Mallarmé’s ‘idée’; Kafka’s ‘Gesetz’, law, as in his parable, ‘Vor dem Gesetz’, ‘Before the Law’, in Der Prozeß (The Trial); or Derrida’s ‘tout autre’, wholly other; or Derrida’s untellable secret, ‘if there is one’, as he says. It would be a mistake to think of this ‘wholly other’ as one single monolithic or even monotheistic transcendent nameless ‘something’. If ‘every other is wholly other’, as Derrida claims (see ‘Tout autre’), then each encounter-withoutencounter of it is singular, unique, a local abstraction. Every wholly other is, by definition, wholly different from every other wholly other, as well as wholly different from me. The wholly other must be thought of as a swarming plurality, not a oneness, an Einheit. As Derrida says in the last sentence of ‘Psyché: Invention de l’autre’, ‘L’autre appelle à venir et cela n’arrive qu’à plusieurs voix’ (61). (The other calls to come [or, calls the future] and that does not happen [or arrive] except in multiple voices [my translation].) I have said Stevens’ title ‘names’ this strange river. The word ‘names’ is important since it indicates that what the poem talks about is not really a river. The poet only calls it a river, in a performative catachresis that gives a name to the nameless secret that the scenery of the poem everywhere tells of without making visible. The poem depends on distinctions between seeing, naming and telling. The river of rivers in Connecticut is ‘not to be seen beneath the appearances / That tell of it’ (my italics). The poet, in his answer or response to this telling – that is, in his poem – cannot directly name or refer to this river, since it is incompatible with referential language. It is an ‘unnamed flowing’. The poet can only call it something that is not literally what it is. He can only, ‘call it, again and again, / The river that flows nowhere, like a sea’. This calling is more a performative invocation than a referential naming, even a catachrestic one.


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Here is the poem: There is a great river this side of Stygia, Before one comes to the first black cataracts And trees that lack the intelligence of trees. In that river, far this side of Stygia, The mere flowing of the water is a gayety, Flashing and flashing in the sun. On its banks, No shadow walks. The river is fateful, Like the last one. But there is no ferryman. He could not bend against its propelling force. It is not to be seen beneath the appearances That tell of it. The steeple at Farmington Stands glistening and Haddam shines and sways. It is the third commonness with light and air, A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction . . . Call it, once more, a river, an unnamed flowing, Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore Of each of the senses; call it, again and again, The river that flows nowhere, like a sea. (CPP 451) ‘[C]all it, again and again, / The river that flows nowhere, like a sea’. ‘The river of rivers’ is not really the name of this secret ‘something’ in Connecticut. That is just what the poet calls it. It is actually an ‘unnamed flowing’, but even ‘flowing’ is a word borrowed from the name for what real rivers do. No language can name this river of rivers, except by indirection, though ‘indirection’ is not an adequate word for this performative response to the unnameable. This beautiful and moving poem calls forth endless commentary, for example what might be said to gloss the provocative phrase about trees that lack the intelligence of trees. This wonderful phrase does not mean that some trees are smart. It rather transfers our knowledge of trees, this side of Stygia, to the trees themselves. When we get to those black cataracts of Stygia, the realm of death, we shall forget all human knowledge. The river Stevens calls out to, however, is ‘far this side of Stygia’. This is a poem about life under the sunlight in Connecticut, not primarily about the realm of death. No shadow walks beside this river, such as the shadows that walk on Stygia’s banks. Stevens’ river is not black with death and lack of intelligence. Its ‘mere

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flowing’, rather, is full of ‘a gayety, / Flashing and flashing in the sun’. Something could be said at length about every word and phrase in this poem, for example about the admirable lines that show a revelation-without-revelation through shining and glistening, as in the figure of appearance as a ‘shining forth’ from Plato through Hegel’s scheinen to Heidegger’s similar terminology. Even though the river of rivers is not to be seen beneath the appearances that tell of it, nevertheless, ‘The steeple at Farmington / Stands glistening and Haddam shines and sways’. I find those lines movingly beautiful, and not just because I have been to Haddam and Farmington. As Jacques Derrida, for example, has abundantly shown, this connectionwithout-connection of literature with the wholly other has crucial implications for the ethical and political functioning of literature.2 Can the newer magical media – film, television, computer games, popular music and so on – do anything with words or other signs comparable to what Stevens so effortlessly does with the printed word? Perhaps, but with great difficulty, and in ways that are hardly noticeable, or at any rate that are not noticed by most of the scholars who write about the new media. For most of them, ‘other’ means the racial, national, linguistic, ethnic or gender other, not Derrida’s ‘tout autre’. It sounds absurd to claim that the computer game World of Warcraft keeps a secret, in the sense that Derrida means ‘secret’, though it might be worth trying to demonstrate that this is the case. What we call written literature has an almost unique and irreplaceable performative function in human culture, even in a time of globalization and the increasing dominance of new teletechnologicoprestidigitizing media. The reader will see that though ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’ is a resolutely local poem, a poem about Stevens’ home state of Connecticut, nevertheless understanding it depends almost as much on European concepts as on Connecticut place-names. I myself lived for years in Bethany, Connecticut, not far from Hartford, Haddam and Farmington, but I need references to Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida and others to reflect adequately on this poem. I have used a mixture of native American ‘new criticism’ and continental-derived ‘deconstruction’ to patch together my commentary. Like Stevens, I have become, partly through trying to understand Stevens, a Transatlantic American, given to bricolage. Of the following example of a poem, or in this case, part of a poem, placed in Europe, the reverse of what I have said about ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’ would need to be stressed. Though the passage is placed in Denmark, the choice of Denmark seems almost arbitrary. It is easy to hear in the poem what sounds like the voice of Stevens in Hartford meditating on what it would be like to live in a real community, for example in what he imagines Denmark to be like. I juxtapose William Carlos Williams and Stevens, in order to make my point more clearly. I move gradually, by way of community as a topic, toward the ‘Danes in Denmark’ passage, my chief example of ‘Transatlantic Stevens’.3


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Sharp differences between Williams and Stevens mean a reader with an ‘ear’ would be unlikely to mistake a poem by one as by the other. Nevertheless, some strange similarities emerge when the critic steps back a little and asks where they stand on the topic of the relation of the poet to his or her community. Both poets share certain assumptions about what would make a good community, a viable community. Both poets presuppose, as a fundamental assumption of all their work, that we (meaning we the American people) have lost a community belonging that we once had. The poetry of both is, in believing this, strangely and unexpectedly nostalgic. Williams in Paterson expresses this nostalgia primarily through negation, that is, through strong condemnations of Paterson’s current lack of community. Paterson is a city in New Jersey, but also the name of the speaker/protagonist of the poem, which is named Paterson, so the word has a triple reference. An example of Williams’ nostalgia is the description of the indifferent lovers in the Paterson park on a Sunday. These lovers are a degraded parody of the two giants, Paterson and the landscape-woman, whose embrace constitutes the whole scene of Paterson: Minds beaten thin by waste – among the working classes SOME sort of breakdown has occurred. Semi-roused they lie upon their blanket face to face, mottled by the shadows of the leaves upon them, unannoyed, at least here unchallenged. Not undignified . . . (P 66–7) Stevens’ indictment, in ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’, of our present sad community-less social state is no less stern. He blames our situation in part on the diffusion of ‘liberal’ thinking, though too much superficial education, opinion polling, loss of privacy by living in housing complexes and the intrusion of the radio are also blamed. If Stevens were alive today, would he have voted for George W. Bush? That is not, alas, improbable. In any case, Stevens did not see either the working class (what he calls the ‘masses’) or the middle class as in any way ‘not undignified’: The enormous influence of education in giving everyone a little learning, and in giving large groups considerably more: something of history,

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something of philosophy, something of literature; the expansion of the middle class with its common preference for realistic satisfactions; the penetration of the masses of people by the ideas of liberal thinkers [I wonder what ‘liberal thinkers’ he has in mind: John Dewey? Sidney Hook?], even when that penetration is indirect, as by the reporting of the reasons why people oppose the ideas that they oppose, – these are normal aspects of everyday life. The way we live and the way we work alike cast us out on reality. If fifty private houses were to be built in New York this year, it would be a phenomenon. We no longer live in homes but in housing projects and this is so whether the project is literally a project or a club, a dormitory, a camp or an apartment in River House. It is not only that there are more of us and that we are actually close together. We are close together in every way. We lie in bed and listen to a broadcast from Cairo, and so on. There is no distance. We are intimate with people we have never seen and, unhappily, they are intimate with us. Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces. (CPP 653) What do these poets think a proper community would be like? One eloquent passage in Stevens’ ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ describes the community we once had but have no longer. The indigene, however, is as much a Western or even Transatlantic concept as the cybersurfer is a product of Western cultural capitalism. The notion of the indigene is implicitly associated with the idea of the ‘noble savage’, and with the ethnographical search for what Maurice Blanchot, discussing Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, calls ‘man at point zero’ (see Blanchot). The indigene lives unselfconsciously where he or she was born, as the etymology of the word avers. It means ‘born within’. On the island off the Maine coast where I now live most of the year, the distinction is between those ‘from here’ and those ‘from away’. It takes three or four generations born on the island and living out their lives there to become included among those ‘from here’. The indigene is ‘rooted’ permanently in ‘one dear perpetual place’, as W. B. Yeats calls it (189). He or she remains in the state celebrated so nostalgically and so beautifully by Wallace Stevens in ‘The Auroras of Autumn’. The indigene was in a now-lost state of oneness with his or her milieu. Stevens calls it ‘a time of innocence’: That we partake thereof, Lie down like children in this holiness, As if, awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep, As if the innocent mother sang in the dark Of the room and on an accordion, half-heard, Created the time and place in which we breathed . . .


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IX And of each other thought – in the idiom Of the work, in the idiom of an innocent earth, Not of the enigma of the guilty dream. We were as Danes in Denmark all day long And knew each other well, hale-hearted landsmen, For whom the outlandish was another day Of the week, queerer than Sunday. We thought alike And that made brothers of us in a home In which we fed on being brothers, fed And fattened as on a decorous honeycomb. This drama that we live – We lay sticky with sleep. (CPP 361–2) All the salient features of the Western concept of the indigene or of what it is like to live in an undisturbed indigenous culture or community are movingly chanted in this passage; Stevens is an American poet who has expressed as well as any of our great poets our sense of homeland places, whether it is Hartford, Connecticut, where he lived, or Pennsylvania Dutch country, where he was born, or Florida, where he vacationed, or even Tennessee, as in ‘Anecdote of the Jar’: ‘I placed a jar in Tennessee’ (CPP 60). I have already mentioned some examples of Stevens’ use of resonant American place-names. Stevens’ early poem, ‘Sunday Morning’, celebrates the particularities of the US landscape as determining the life that is lived there: ‘Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail / Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; / Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness’ (CPP 56). Many other Stevens poems make the same claim for the determining power of place over culture, as in the line, ‘The natives of the rain are rainy men’ (CPP 30), in ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’. Just what are the ‘salient features’ of an indigenous community, according to Stevens? I say ‘indigenous community’ because Stevens stresses that it is an experience shared by a ‘we’: ‘We were as Danes in Denmark all day long . . .’ (my italics). This assumption that the indigene lives in a community of other indigenes like himself or herself is one main feature of Stevens’ indigene ideology. To be an indigene is to be part of a collectivity, to have collective experience. An indigenous community, moreover, is located in a place, a milieu, an environment, that is cut off from the outside world, the ‘outlandish’, the ‘queer’, one might almost say the uncanny, in the sense implied by the German word unheimlich, literally ‘unhomelike’. Indigenes are ‘hale-hearted landsmen’. They belong to the land, to its rocks, rivers, trees, soil and ways of living on the land. They would feel uprooted if they moved

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elsewhere. The indigene feels at home in his place, as Danes feel at home in Denmark, or as bees are at home in their honeycomb. To be an indigene is to be innocent, childlike, almost as if asleep while awake. This innocence is like that of Adam and Eve before the fall. The indigenes know not good and evil. They do not suffer the ‘enigma of the guilty dream’ that persecutes fallen men and women, for example the terrifying Oedipal male dream of having killed one’s father and slept with one’s mother. Indigenes lack self-consciousness, as though they were sleepwalkers. They are ‘sticky with sleep’. ‘Sticky’ here is associated with the decorous honeycomb on which the indigenes feed. Their at-home-ness makes their milieu a kind of sleep-inducing narcotic, as eating the honey they have collected puts bees to sleep, makes them ‘sticky with sleep’. Not only are the indigenes not aware of themselves, with the painful self-awareness and habit of guilty introspection that is supposed to characterize Western man; the indigenes are also not aware of their environment in the sense of holding it at arm’s length and analysing it. They take their milieu for granted as something that has always been there and always will be, eternally, as Denmark is for the Danes, according to Stevens. Why does Stevens choose Danes as exemplary of an indigenous community? I suppose because they live in a small country, have a homogenous culture and speak a ‘minority’ language that cuts them off from others. That fits most people’s idea of an indigenous community. To mention language leads me to note that language plays a crucial role in Stevens’ description. An indigenous community is created not just through shared ways of living, building and farming on a particular homeland soil. It is also created out of language, by way of language, a particular language that belongs to that place. One effect of modern industrial and technological civilization is to endanger, if not extinguish, so-called ‘minority’ languages everywhere. A dozen indigenous languages can disappear forever in California in a single year, as the last ‘native speaker’ of each one of them dies. Thinking of the vanishing of indigenous languages makes the language theme in Stevens’ lines all the more poignant. He sees an indigenous community as generated by language, in an act of maternal and artistic creation that mimes the creation of the world, in Genesis, out of the primordial darkness: ‘As if the innocent mother sang in the dark / Of the room and on an accordion, half-heard, / Created the time and place in which we breathed . . . // And of each other thought’. Why ‘on an accordion’? I suppose because it is a ‘folk instrument’. An accordion is suitable for creating the togetherness of a folk. Perhaps also it is because overtones of consonant togetherness in the word ‘accord’ are buried in the word ‘accordion’. The members of an indigenous community are in accord. They are ‘of one accord’. In an assertion that recalls Heidegger’s argument in ‘Bauen Wohnen Denken’ (‘Building Dwelling Thinking’) and in his essays on Hölderlin’s poems, Stevens asserts that the time and place of an indigenous community are not there to begin with and then occupied by the people. A native language creates the homeland that


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gives a people breathing room, a place to breathe, and therefore also to speak to one another. Stevens’ sentence just cited ends with the phrase ‘And of each other thought’. The language that creates the time and place of an indigenous community is also the medium in which the ‘natives’ or ‘autochthons’ think of one another. Each indigene can penetrate the minds of his or her fellows because they all speak the same language, the same ‘idiom’, that is, a dialect peculiar to a specific group. It is the ‘idiom / Of the work’, that is, I take it, an idiom special to the work the innocent mother plays on the accordion, though there may also be an overtone of ‘work’ as the collective creation through language and through the physical transformation of the environment of an indigenous community. This would be akin to the Marxist notion of work or to Heidegger’s notion of Bauen, ‘building’. The mother’s accordion work is also in ‘the idiom of an innocent earth’. The earth is innocent because it too has not yet fallen with Adam and Eve’s fall. The language spoken by indigenes is, as they are, born of the earth and remains rooted in it. Language, for Stevens here, is the embodiment of thought, and each native knows what his or her fellow is thinking because, as we say, ‘they speak the same language’. The result is that we ‘knew each other well’, because, in Stevens’ sexist formulation, ‘We thought alike / And that made brothers of us in a home / In which we fed on being brothers’. Much might be said about this exclusion of women in the invocation of ‘brotherhood’, blood brotherhood. It is a kind of easy, unselfconscious sexism that would be a little harder to assert so blithely these days. Stevens’ idea of at-home-ness, finally, means that the place and the community dwelling within it are sacred. These happy autochthons ‘Lie down like children in this holiness’. Wonderful! Hooray! Or, as Stevens puts this exuberance a few lines later in ‘The Auroras of Autumn’: ‘A happy people in a happy world – / Buffo! A ball, an opera, a bar’ (CPP 362). Only two problems shadow this celebration. One is that the indigenous community is a myth. It always is a matter of something that hypothetically once existed and no longer exists. ‘We were as Danes in Denmark’, but that is no longer the case. As Stevens puts this: There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place. Or if there is no time, If it is not a thing of time, nor of place, Existing in the idea of it, alone, In the sense against calamity, it is not Less real. (CPP 360–1) An indigenous community is real enough, but it has the reality of something that exists only in the idea of it, before time, and outside of all place.

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The other menace that shadows this idea is that even this mythical innocent community was always darkened by the terror of invasion. It exists as ‘the sense against calamity’, but that calamity is always imminent. That calamity appears suddenly as a stark fear or terror just a few lines beyond the long passage I have been discussing: Shall we be found hanging in the trees next spring? Of what disaster is this the imminence: Bare limbs, bare trees and a wind as sharp as salt? (CPP 362) The poem, after all, is called ‘The Auroras of Autumn’. Its chief figure is terrifying autumnal displays of aurora borealis or northern lights, as they presage winter. Simply to name all the features of an indigenous community, even in a lyric poem so celebratory of the idea of it as is Stevens’, is to destroy it by bringing it self-consciously into the light. To name it is to call up its specular mirror image: the terror of its destruction. This obverse is generated out of its very security, as a sense of disaster’s imminence. ‘A happy people in a happy world’ sounds, and is, too good to be true. To imagine having it is to be terrified of losing it. The imagination of being at home, in a homeland or Heimat, instantly raises the fearful ghost of the unheimlich, the uncanny, the alien at the door or probably already secretly resident somewhere inside the homeland. The passage in ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ not only recognizes that a community of ‘Danes in Denmark’ is only an idea, not something that ever actually existed. It also asserts that thinking about community generates the fear of losing it, the terror that the homeland will be violently invaded. The speaker of Stevens’ poem asks, ‘Shall we be found hanging in the trees next spring?’ Both Stevens and Williams, in different ways, assume that community is now lost. Both affirm or propose that the cause – or at least an essential concomitant of that present loss – is failure in the vital language that once knit together viable communities. Stevens, in ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’, denigrates American universities by saying that ‘to one that thinks, as Dr. Richards thinks [and Stevens clearly agrees with I. A. Richards], that poetry is the supreme use of language, some of the foreign universities in relation to our own appear to be, so far as the things of the imagination are concerned, as Verrocchio is to the sculptor of the statue of General Jackson’ (CPP 654). American universities, for Stevens, ought to preserve and affirm poetic language, the highest use of language, language that ought to bind the community together, but they do not. They are as the decadent and lifeless statue of General Jackson is to the noble statue by Verrocchio of the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice. The motif of language’s present-day failure recurs throughout Paterson: ‘The language, the language / fails them’ (P 20); ‘– the language is worn out’


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(P 103). Many examples of current stammering inarticulate lower-class idiom are given in the poem. Language is divorced, like a bud torn from its plant. If no community exists, no vital language exists, and vice versa. The most astonishing proposal is made, again in different ways, by both poets, as a way to escape from this bad situation. The poet and the poet alone can, single-handed, put the world together again, not with the bare hands, but with words. In the preliminary note to Paterson, Williams speaks of his poem as ‘a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands’ (P 10), meaning by ‘bare hands’, I suppose, the awkward speech of American idiom. The last line of Stevens’ ‘Parochial Theme’ is a ringing exhortation. More unequivocally than Williams, it implies that poetic language is the means of reconstruction: ‘Piece the world together, boys, but not with your hands’ (CPP 177). No girls invited. Any future re-establishment of living communities depends on the poet, not just any poet, but the poet who makes this proposal: Stevens in his own way, Williams in his. This idea runs all through Paterson, like a recurrent motif or melody in a tone poem. Poetic salvation, for Williams, takes the form of a search for a new poetic ‘line’, a peculiarly autochthonous American rhythm. Such a new prosody will rise from the ruins, the drek, of presentday degradation. It will harmonize again nature and the people living in new-made communities within it. Perhaps the most beautiful expression of this amazing notion (one might call it a primitive or magic belief) is the following admirable segment of Paterson: Without invention nothing is well spaced . . . ... . . . without invention nothing lies under the witch-hazel bush, the alder does not grow from among the hummocks margining the all but spent channel of the old swale, the small foot-prints of the mice under the overhanging tufts of the bunch-grass will not appear: without invention the line will never again take on its ancient divisions when the word, a supple word, lived in it, crumbled now to chalk. (P 65) In Stevens’ case the claim is that the poet, and the poet alone, is the maker of ‘supreme fictions’ by which people will come to live their lives: What is his [the poet’s] function? . . . I think that his function is to make his imagination theirs [people’s] and that he fulfils himself only as he sees

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his imagination become the light in the minds of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives. . . . There is, in fact, a world of poetry indistinguishable from the world in which we live, or, I ought to say, no doubt, from the world in which we shall come to live, since what makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it. (CPP 660–1, 662) The poet is the creator of ideologies, that is, the poet leads us to identify a fictive, linguistic world and the real world. We cannot even conceive of the latter without the poet’s supreme fictions. Such fictions operate, like ideology, without our awareness. ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ is Stevens’ attempt to work out in detail, and simultaneously exemplify, what such supreme fictions would be like. This is done under the rather strange rubrics, imperative commands actually, that give each section a title: ‘It Must Be Abstract’; ‘It Must Change’; ‘It Must Give Pleasure’. ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ ends with a separate poem as coda. Like the rest of the poem, this coda was written during the Second World War. It asserts that the poet too is at war, a war ‘between the mind / And sky, between thought and day and night’ (CPP 351). Stevens claims, implausibly, that soldiers will die more cheerfully because of the poet’s work or war, his poetry as war. Soldiers may sometimes be willing to die because they have imbibed the ideology of nationalist patriotism, but that is hardly the same thing as joining the grateful dead because you have read Wallace Stevens or other poets ‘in the American grain’. Nevertheless, that is, I think, what Stevens asserts: Monsieur and comrade, The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines, His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick, Inevitably modulating, in the blood. And war for war, each has its gallant kind. How simply the fictive hero becomes the real; How gladly with proper words the soldier dies, If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech. (CPP 352) I have said that the claim made in different ways by both these poets that poetic language will re-instate viable communities is astonishing. It is astonishing partly because of its hyperbolic confidence. No doubt what Stevens


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and Williams say about the role of the poet in modern societies, the poet’s magical power to turn non-communities into communities, has its roots in Romanticism and its Victorian aftermath. Stevens’ and Williams’ more immediate sources are Rimbaud and Surrealism. Nineteenth-century precursors are Shelley’s ‘Defence of Poetry’ or Matthew Arnold’s claim that as religion fails us, poetry will more and more come to take its place. Williams in particular echoes Rimbaud’s claim that poetry will make everything anew after destroying the old orders in an apocalyptic act of demolition. Nevertheless, in spite of this honourable ancestry, these days – or even already in the 1940s when Stevens and Williams wrote – poetry, in Stevens’ definition of it, probably, at least in the United States, has and had only a minimal effect on society. Such communities as we have today in the United States, if we have any, are generated and bound together by radio talk-shows, by church membership, by television, radio, cinema, computer games and the Internet, not to any large extent by poetry-reading. I am willing to believe poetry should have the power Stevens says it has or ought to have, but I fear that it may not be so, at least not yet. The poetic projects of both poets, moreover, though they produced the magnificent poetry of Paterson or ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, contain intrinsically their own contradictions. I shall conclude with an identification of those. In Stevens’ case, the term ‘supreme fiction’ hints at an impasse. On the one hand, the fiction concocted by the poet is ‘supreme’ in the sense of taking dominion everywhere, like that jar in Tennessee. A supreme fiction is imperial, sovereign, all-powerful. When the supreme fiction takes dominion, everyone under its jurisdiction will live his or her life by it, according to the law enunciated in ‘Large Red Man Reading’. In that poem, the poet’s ‘purple tabulae’ combine the red of reality with the blue of imagination. They are a species of making, of poesis, a way of doing things with words that may do other things in their turn when those words are read. Those tabulae contain ‘The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law: / Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines’ (CPP 365). The vatic power of poetry lies in its literal characters, that is, in the letters on the page from which the large red man reads. On the other hand, the supreme fiction is, precisely, a ‘fiction’. It is something concocted, factitious, something made up. In short, it is untrue. It is difficult, to speak seriously, to live one’s life according to a fiction known to be a fiction. This intrinsic contradiction in Stevens’ poetic project generates the endless meditation that is his poetry, as he makes ceaseless, never entirely successful, attempts to ‘get it straight’ (CPP 351). Stevens’ poetry, as could be shown in detail, alternates between two contrary penchants. One is the attempt to wipe away all previous false ideas and get down to bedrock reality or truth, to what Stevens calls ‘The the’ (CPP 186). The other vector is the attempt to create, on the basis of that descent, new radiant fictions made of words. These will demonstrate the sovereignty

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of the imagination, its power over ‘reality’. These new fictions rapidly reveal their factitiousness. As such they must be destroyed. They must be repudiated as so much moonshine. Then the process must begin again, ceaselessly, thereby demonstrating that ‘It Must Change’. ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ is, after all, just ‘Notes Toward . . .’ It is not the triumphant finished product. It is not the supreme fiction once and for all ‘made and laid’, like that ‘copious egg’ in stanza 30 of ‘Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery’ (CPP 125). Whatever the poet writes is no more than tentative attempts in the direction of . . . well, in the direction of something that always remains future, yet to be. This double movement is visible everywhere in Stevens’ poetry, but a short poem from Parts of a World (1942), ‘Mrs. Alfred Uruguay’, neatly exemplifies it. Mrs Uruguay rides a donkey up a mountain in the moonlight, in a resolute act of decreation: ‘“I have said no / To everything, in order to get at myself”’, she says. ‘“I have wiped away moonlight like mud”’. By this deprivation, ‘she approached the real’. ‘And for her, / To be, regardless of velvet [her dress], could never be more / Than to be, she could never differently be, / Her no and no made yes impossible’ (CPP 225). As Mrs Alfred Uruguay rides up, a noble rider passes her on the way down, a ‘figure of capable imagination’, for whom, precisely, ‘what is was other things’ (‘Oak Leaves Are Hands’; CPP 243). He is ‘a rider intent on the sun’, ‘Rushing from what was real; and capable’ (CPP 226). The poem ends with one of Stevens’ most eloquent (and wild) salutes to the poet’s power to create supreme fictions. The poem does not just describe, constatively. It does what it talks about, performatively: The villages slept as the capable man went down, Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive, The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds, As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed, Impatient of the bells and midnight forms, Rode over the picket rocks, rode down the road, And, capable, created in his mind, Eventual victor, out of the martyrs’ bones, The ultimate elegance: the imagined land. (CPP 226) I have said Stevens’ supreme fictions are perhaps without ground. Williams’ claim that the right poetic line makes the grass grow is, it may be, not all that easy to accept, even if you take that claim as in one way or another a metaphor, a poetic fiction. In both poets, however, an evanescent vestigial presence exists of a claim that genuine poetry is grounded in a Platonic or quasi-Heideggerian ‘Being’, Sein, Grund or ‘Logos’, another Transatlantic concept. This would be something immanent and transcendent at once,


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something that only the true poet can glimpse and catch, at moments, in words. ‘Logos’ in Greek means ‘being’, ‘ground’, ‘word’, ‘measure’ and ‘ratio’, all at once. Stevens’ large red man reading reads the ‘outlines of being and its expressings’ (my emphasis). Williams in Paterson names this evasive ground sometimes ‘Beautiful Thing’ (P 148 and passim), sometimes ‘radiant gist’ (P 133). The latter is literally the luminous radium left in the bottom of Marie Curie’s retort, but it names in figure a more evanescent radiance. Williams, you can see, had his cosmopolitan side too. Madame Curie is hardly American. Williams was partly Caribbean in ancestry, and proud of it, just as Stevens was proud of his Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry, as I am of mine. If even Williams has his Transatlantic side, Stevens is still more conspicuously a hybrid poet, mixing the indigenous with American culture’s essential Transatlantic legacy, whatever Stevens claims to the contrary in ‘Sunday Morning’.

Notes 1. The discussion of this poem is drawn, in somewhat modified form, from the final section of a lecture given originally at Tsinghua University in Beijing in August 2006. The lecture was called ‘A Defense of Literature and Literary Study in a Time of Globalization and the New Tele-Technologies’. The full text will be published in a forthcoming issue of Neohelicon. 2. See, for example, ‘La littérature au secret: Une filiation impossible’, the second essay in Donner la mort, not included in the 1995 English translation by David Wills but apparently scheduled to appear in an expanded edition of The Gifts of Death. This important essay has also been translated into English by Adam Kotsko and circulated here and there by email. 3. The remainder of this chapter borrows, with modifications, from a plenary lecture entitled ‘The Individual (Poet) and the Community: Stevens and Williams’. The lecture was prepared for the National Poetry Foundation conference on ‘Poetries of the 1940s, American and International’, held 23–27 June 2004, at the University of Maine, at Orono. The discussion of the passage in ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ is drawn, with modifications for this chapter, from an article called ‘The Indigene and the Cybersurfer’. The full essay was published in Chinese in a book edited by Jin Huimin, and in English in Ariel 34.1 (2003).

Works cited Blanchot, Maurice. ‘L’homme au point zéro’. L’Amitié. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. 87–97. Blanchot, Maurice. ‘Man at Point Zero’. Friendship. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. 73–82. Derrida, Jacques. Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. Paris: Galilée, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Tout autre est tout autre’. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 82–115.

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Derrida, Jacques. ‘La littérature au secret: Une filiation impossible’. Donner la mort. Paris: Galilée, 1999. 159–209. Mallarmé, Stéphane. ‘Crise de vers’. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Morris, William, ed. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Boston: American Heritage Publishing; Houghton Mifflin, 1969. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. New York: New Directions, 1963. (Abbreviated as P.) Yeats, William Butler. The Poems. New edn. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Macmillan, 1983.

3 Stevens’ Europe: Delicate Clinkings and Total Grandeur Robert Rehder

Americans have always thought that all of English literature belongs to them. English is their language and its literature naturally part of their heritage and identity, and all of European culture, too, for that matter, because in the beginning they were almost all Europeans. They all have a share of Whitman’s inclusiveness and eclecticism. The British, in their very successful insularity, even now do not accept American literature as part of their tradition. The difference between British and American poetry in the last hundred years or so is the difference between Tennyson and Whitman, and Whitman’s place in American poetry is radically more important than Tennyson’s in the British tradition. All American poets after Whitman have had to come to terms with Whitman and all have benefited from his freedom, even if they choose not to follow him (see Rehder and Vincent). Tennyson does not have a comparable place in British poetry. After the major changes in European poetry inaugurated by Coleridge and Wordsworth, the distinguishing characteristic of American poetry is its capacity for radical change. This began with Whitman and continued with Pound, Eliot, Williams and Stevens. If Whitman and his ‘new free forms’ are the first thing that separates American and British poetry, the second is the capacity of American poets to make use of the French poetry from Baudelaire to Valéry, which is, Eliot says, ‘perhaps the most interesting, possibly the most characteristic and certainly the most original development of the aesthetic of verse made in the period’ (42). The French poets, Eliot declares, ‘are as much in our bones as Shakespeare and Donne’. The new American poetry after Whitman is remarkable for the fact that Pound and Eliot, the first two poets to publish major work, both found it necessary to write a very large number of essays on European authors, old and new, a body of criticism valuable in its own right, and that, in effect, re-examines and redefines the European tradition for Americans, as if this re-examination was necessary for their own work to go forward. Wallace Stevens sees Whitman as the sun in ‘Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery’ (CPP 121) and on the subject of freedom states that ‘[t]he essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used’ (CPP 801). He is vividly 41

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aware of the difference between the United States and Britain. ‘Americans are not British in sensibility’, he declares in the ‘Adagia’ (CPP 913), and often marks that difference in his poems, as when in ‘Autumn Refrain’, alluding to Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, he says that the nightingale is a bird that he never has and never will hear (CPP 129). On the evidence of this poem published in 1932, Stevens had by then decided that he was never going to Europe. For all this, his poems are full of allusions to and echoes of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Baudelaire and Mallarmé, the combination of British and French poetry that characterizes Pound and Eliot. The ‘mythy goober khan’ of ‘Academic Discourse at Havana’ (CPP 115) is an allusion to Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’. ‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds’ takes its French refrain from Baudelaire’s ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ and the young poet in his attic room in ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ (CPP 332) refers to Baudelaire’s ‘Paysage’. ‘Esthétique du Mal’ echoes Les Fleurs du mal. The men painting lakes in ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’ alludes to Mallarmé’s ‘Las de l’amer repos’. And these are only a few examples, although usually Stevens has so assimilated and transformed his source that it is impossible to identify it with any certainty; nonetheless, the presence of these various poets is undeniable. For Stevens, European poetry was his natural heritage as an American and a poet. With Europe as a place, he had a slightly different relation. Like all the places he had never been, it was the ground of his imagination, closer because of his personal history – his Dutch and German ancestors, his reading of European literature and study of its languages (French, German, Latin, Greek in school, French and German at Harvard) – than Ceylon or China (Rehder, Poetry 11–12). It was a place to which he was intimately connected, about which he had no doubts as to its existence, but of which his knowledge was only of words. This situation is the fundamental informing metaphor of his poetry. Reality exists, but we know it imperfectly and incompletely, almost and not quite. Stevens’ use of the conditional, his way of stating a thing and then stating the opposite, and his habit of constant qualification are his way of expressing the problematic nature of our knowledge of the world. The idea is clearly set out in ‘Description Without Place’ (1945), a poem in which there are no American references.1 All the proper names are European except ‘Pablo Neruda in Ceylon’ (CPP 298). When it comes to an example of the queen upon whom so much depends, he chooses Queen Anne, specifically ‘Of England’ (ibid.), in part probably because ‘the age of Queen Anne’ is a commonplace, and also because at Harvard he took English 7, ‘English Literature of the Period of Queen Anne’, in which he received a B+ (L 23 n. 1). He mentions Calvin, Nietzsche, Lenin, a Spanish ‘Museo Olimpico’, the evangelist John and ends with repeated references to Spain as his exemplary place. Nietzsche is in Basel, living in a foreign country, as are Lenin and Neruda. Nietzsche studies a metaphoric pool, Lenin is by a real lake and both are in Switzerland. Lenin’s lake is either that of Zurich or Geneva, more probably

Stevens’ Europe: Delicate Clinkings/Total Grandeur

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Zurich. These European references locate the abstractions in time and space, and add definiteness and specificity. They give the ideas a history and put them in perspective at the same time as intimating that reality is a foreign country. Stevens starts the poem with a possibility: ‘It is possible that to seem – it is to be’, but when he next introduces the sun as an example, the certainty increases: ‘the sun is something seeming and it is’ (CPP 296). The sun exists, there is a reality and for us it seems to exist. The seeming is what we know. The radical and final uncertainty of our knowledge of reality haunts the poet. ‘Such seemings are the actual ones: the way / Things look each day, each morning’ (CPP 297). This is the fundamental, dubious certainty of our everyday lives. The European proper nouns, the historical references in the poem come in a crowd toward the end of the poem’s third section. Nietzsche and Lenin then divide the fourth section between them, seven stanzas for Nietzsche, eight for Lenin. (The number of stanzas varies from section to section.) The Europeans appear after Stevens, in some of the poem’s most beautiful and powerful lines, considers the possibility that seeming and existing might be the same thing, a change ‘in which being would // Come true’, when the world would be an ‘immediate whole’ that we ‘do not need to understand’ and that would be ‘complete / Without secret arrangements of it in the mind’ (CPP 298). The imagination’s power and perhaps its purpose, its raison d’être, is to offer us these moments of completion, even if fictitious and temporary. They are perhaps our most urgent need. Certainly, they recur as the final, conclusive, always wished-for moments in Stevens’ poetry, and they are usually associated with a woman, in this case a queen. For the baby, the mother is the world and it gradually finds its identity in separating itself from the mother and then the world from the mother. Wordsworth is perhaps the first to clearly state this relationship, in his autobiographical poem (Published in 1850 as The Prelude), where he says that the interaction of the mother and the baby ‘is the first / Poetic spirit of our human life –’ (1805, II.237–80). Stevens’ version of this is in ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ where he affirms ‘The mother’s face, / The purpose of the poem’ (CPP 356), and in his many invocations of women from the high-toned old Christian woman to the interior paramour. The mother is the muse, the queen, and it is to her that he says in ‘Sunday Morning’ that we wish to return: Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. (CPP 55) Thus, the queen makes everything and ‘An age is a manner collected from a queen’; and, as the process of self-definition and disengagement from the

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mother is never complete, ‘she came, and comes / And seems to be on the saying of her name’ (CPP 297). She is ever-present. Section four of the poem offers us a pair of thinkers (CPP 299–300). As so often in Stevens, the structure is binary (the mother-child relation). Nietzsche thinks about thoughts and perceptions, ‘seemings’. He contemplates ‘the deep pool’ of his mind like another Narcissus. His concern is with the past, ‘souvenirs’, an attempt to impose order on experience. Lenin is uninterested in the beauty of his surroundings. He looks to the future. He imagines tomorrow. Nietzsche wants mastery, to find the form in the crowds of seemings. He wants unity: ‘total affluence, all first, / All final’. The unity he establishes is one of style, a personal illumination as if he were his own sun, the ‘innate light’ of his style and individuality. For Stevens, Nietzsche was ‘a perfect example’ of ‘how a strong mind distorts the world’. ‘The incessant job’, he writes to Henry Church (8 December 1942), ‘is to get into focus, not out of focus. Nietzsche is as perfect a means of getting out of focus as a little bit too much to drink’ (L 431–2). This is the reason he is portrayed studying a fluid, moving pool of discolourations and ‘forms / In the much-mottled motion’, why his thoughts are ‘eccentric’, and why they gilder the pool. Grandiose and manias suggest the rhetoric, megalomania and mental illness that pervade Nietzsche’s later writings. Manias clearly denotes that this is the inner world. Nietzsche’s portrait is vaguer, more abstract, less personal than that of Lenin, who is presented in his old clothes and the poverty of his Swiss exile. ‘Basel’ is all the location there is for Nietzsche. For Lenin, there is a bench, lake, swans and bread. Stevens’ sense of Lenin’s character is probably derived in large measure from Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station (1940) which he appears to have read soon after it was published, as he tells Leonard van Geyzel in December 1940 that he has sent him a copy – and that the book has been praised for ‘the portraits of the figures with which it deals’ (L 381). Lenin is the major figure in the book. Wilson presents Lenin as a practical visionary, a thinker whose ‘theoretical side was not, in a sense serious’, since he was always changing his tactics, because ‘he had always in his mind a single purpose related to theory in a larger sense: the making in Russia of a revolution which should be not merely Russian but Marxist’ (453). Wilson comments: ‘He does not live in theory like Trotsky: he sees always a real situation and he seizes a situation wherever he is able to take hold, without caring whether his story hangs together’. Lenin in his way distorts the present as much as Nietzsche. He lives in the future and is concerned with ‘far-off shapes’ and ‘tomorrow’s legions’ (527). Lenin is somewhat out of phase with his surroundings. Although his clothes ‘Suited the decadence of those silences, / In which he sat’, he ‘was not the man for swans’, who appear to flee him when he scatters bread for them (CPP 299). Lenin keeps ‘the far-off shapes’ and his ‘mind’ raises up the ‘down-drowned . . . chariots’. The drowned chariots are those of the Pharaoh


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lost in the Red Sea. Lenin dreams of being another Moses and of Pharaonic power. His vision is of ‘apocalyptic legions’, the military force necessary to end the old world and establish a new order (CPP 300).2 There are two unambiguous Biblical references. ‘[T]he column in the desert, // On which the dove alights’ reminds us of the dove that Noah sends off from the ark to see if it can find land (CPP 300). These references illustrate the degree to which Stevens transforms his sources. He pursues the idea. Sometimes, as in the echoes of Mallarmé in ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’, it appears he changes them so that they cannot be definitely recognized; at other times, as in the case of the dove and ‘the plentifullest John’ (CPP 301), he leaves enough for us to recognize them, if we can, with enough context that the sense is clear even if we cannot. The main idea here is the problematic nature of reality and the impossibility of any certain knowledge of it. The fifth section begins, like the first, with a possibility: ‘If seeming is description without place, / . . . then a summer’s day . . . / Is description without place’ (CPP 300). For Stevens we live in a world of appearances, seemings. The sun, ‘the way / Things look each day’, are examples. They, ‘the actual seemings’ that we experience, may be real, but they are seemings nonetheless. Stevens’ employment of the word actual to describe seemings (for him, an oxymoron) is a good example of how he tries to create a real world through his language and at the same time indicate that we cannot be sure it does exist. ‘[D]escription without place’ is ‘The spirit’s universe’, the universe of our perceptions and no more than language. It cannot definitely be located anywhere. Note also that by an apposition, he equates ‘a summer’s day’ with ‘Even the seeming of a summer’s day’, such that the reality changes into an appearance. The apposition, however, is not really necessary. The neartautology of the syllogism gives the same result: if seeming is description without place, then a summer’s day is description without place – therefore, a summer’s day is seeming (two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other). We are left to supply the conclusion. The sentence is constructed so that the antecedent of the It that begins the next sentence is unclear. Is seeming or description without place ‘a sense // To which we refer experience’? As the two are hypothetically equal and experience is only of appearances, we are referring one set of seemings (experiences) to another (description without place), so that, in a sense, there is no antecedent. We are faced with an infinite regression, two mirrors facing each other. ‘It is a world of words to the end of it’ (CPP 301). Stevens is a master of the syntax of doubt, but despite the tautology or paradox at the centre of his thinking about reality, he wants and constantly edges toward a bit more certainty. He needs for his experience to refer to something and persists in thinking that it is about the world. Because ‘description’ is the object of the next sentence, let us assume ‘description without place’ is ‘a sense // To which we refer experience’; that is, for Stevens, we have an idea of the world to which we refer all our perceptions, our experience. This equality,

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this act of reference, is a kind of certainty, a sort of meaning – as it has the form of a definition. It is ‘a knowledge / Incognito’, knowledge under a false, pretend and secret name, as solid as a column, but singular, alone and not part of any structure, ‘in the desert’. The metaphor of the dove refers to the moment in Genesis when Noah sends out a dove from the ark and it comes back with a green branch, proving that the flood has abated and that somewhere there is dry land. The green branch is proof of the reality of dry land and of plants growing. Stevens reworks the metaphor so that description is the column and experience is the dove. The idea appears to provide a solid and definite resting place for perception, but it is a metaphor whose terms are unstable. The poem continues with Stevens keeping as close as possible to stating that the world is there without actually doing it. That description is ‘Composed of a sight indifferent to the eye’ implies that it has an independent existence, that it is not created by the act of vision; but ‘an expectation, a desire’ takes back any reality it might have had and indicates that description is merely something wished for. The palm rising beyond the sea makes it definite, if on the faraway horizon like a mirage, but definitely not the real: it is ‘A little different from reality’. Description now becomes the ‘difference that we make in what we see’, the part of imagination or phantasy that we add to each perception, and ‘our memorials of that difference’ – our memories, our language, how we describe what seems to us to be the world. Stevens goes back and forth and round and round. Each re-statement, each metaphor, is a new approximation. This is exactly the way he puts the pineapple together in the poem of that name (‘Someone Puts a Pineapple Together’; CPP 693–7). Instead of certainty, Stevens has poetry. A poem is an object, something solid. Its definiteness is in itself an act of affirmation and it has meaning; it is a statement of how things really are. Stevens is like Eliot and Hart Crane in that he wants to believe, or, more precisely, he believes, but doubts his belief and looks for confirmation. Eliot, unlike Stevens, could not find what he needed in poetry and consequently converted to the Anglican Church. Stevens’ alleged conversion to Catholicism came only when it was clear that he was dying and could no longer write poems.3 Crane in The Bridge invents his own religion, more primitive than Christianity, mythic, a feeling rather than a theology, and, unlike Stevens, derived from his surroundings rather than based upon self-analysis. Stevens starts from and returns to the act of perception. Perception for Crane is not problematic. Stevens’ interest in philosophy is part of his need of abstractions; however, he is unable to accept other people’s systems and in ‘Description Without Place’ the two philosophers he chooses are not conventional ones: Nietzsche, the unsystematic writer, and Lenin, concerned with the practical problems of revolution. Similarly, his two explicit Biblical references, to the dove from Genesis and the ‘thesis of the plentifullest John’, are random, there to add a certain seriousness, the seriousness that comes from religious belief (but


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not the belief itself) and to provide perspective, a sense of the long past and of being concerned with basic truths and origins. John’s thesis – in the beginning was the word – sums up Stevens’ view perfectly, although with the dove he takes the statement out of context and uses it for his own purpose. John is full of the plenty of truth. His sentence contains Stevens’ whole poem. The age of Queen Anne is an example of how the presence of a queen or a set of ideas informs a period of time. Spain is an example of how language informs a culture. Language is man-made and with it men make themselves, their character, their identity, their ‘style of life’ (CPP 302). Spain is a language (Stevens avoids using the word Spanish). This is as much place as we get in the poem. The mountains are ‘the mountainous character’ of the hidalgo’s speech and, however mountainous, are nonetheless a mirror. The ‘hard hidalgo’ lives in his speech as in a place and it is through his speech that Spain knows him – and itself. The subject is cultures and nations, not individuals. The hidalgo is hard as his speech is mountainous. Stevens wants solidity, something tactile, resistant and enduring, although he knows that he cannot have it, only another description. That the description is ‘hollowed out of hollow-bright’ (another Stevens coinage) shows its empty, insubstantial nature. Description is the maker and creator of subjects ‘still half night’, half unknown and unseeable, with no more reality than the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’ (1952) is dedicated to George Santayana, whom Stevens knew when he was at Harvard and who continued to interest him as a type of thinker – another unconventional philosopher like Nietzsche and Lenin. Usually the poem is said to have been inspired by Edmund Wilson’s essay, ‘Santayana at the Convent of the Blue Nuns’, published in The New Yorker, April 1946, but that was over five and a half years before the poem was probably composed and a number of events brought Santayana to Stevens’ attention during that time, if he was ever out of his thoughts. There may also have been a photographic essay in Life with vivid black and white photographs showing Santayana, his room and the Convent in Rome where he had arranged to spend his final years.4 A Life photographer had found Santayana after the liberation of Rome when an American soldier who knew his work sought him out at the Convent. The almost full-page picture is captioned, ‘The US Army in Rome discovers the last puritan, aloof, serene’, and shows Santayana in a dark suit and pale straw hat reading on a park bench. The text mentions that his royalties had been stopped by the war and adds: ‘There while living on charity, he was working on an autobiography, a religious book (although he considers all religions “the great fairy tales of conscience”) and a political treatise’ (Life 40). Persons and Places, the first volume of the autobiography, was published in 1944 and nine chapters (1–3, 7–10, 12–13) appeared in The Atlantic Monthly (1943–44). The second, The Middle Span, was published in 1947 and the third, My Host the World, in 1953. Stevens owned the three volumes of the autobiography and was probably aware of the magazines.

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Holly Stevens writes: ‘It is obvious that Santayana had a lifelong influence on my father, despite his remark, in 1940, that in him “the religious and philosophic are too dominant” ’ (SP 69). José Rodríguez Feo had sent Stevens a letter he had received from Santayana and Stevens replies on 22 April 1949: ‘Your devotion to this superb figure delights me. How strong his handwriting is and how the whole letter convinces one there is nothing mixes with long life like a strong mind. I love his remark: “I have always, somewhat sadly, bowed to expediency or fate” ’ (L 635). Two weeks later, he tells Bernard Heringman he has been repeating the sentence and refers to Santayana as ‘the decrepit old philosopher now living in a convent in Rome’ (L 637). Moreover, he certainly thought about him for his lecture, ‘A Collect of Philosophy’, which he gave at the University of Chicago and CCNY in 1951, and he may have started on the poem sometime after that. As a letter to Joseph Bennett proves, the poem was completed by March 1952, some seven months before Santayana’s death. Santayana moved into the Convent of the Little Company of Mary, an English-speaking order (the sisters were Irish) at Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6, in Rome on 14 or 15 October 1941 when he was 78 and lived there until his death on 26 September 1952 at the age of 89. The Convent included a nursing home and he paid for his room and board. As he explained in a letter to George Sturgis dated 12 October 1941: ‘I am not ill; but I am helpless; too old and threatened by too many difficulties to look after myself successfully . . . [I]t occurred to me to move to the Blue Sisters’ Nursing Home, where I knew they receive persons not definitely ill, but old and delicate and requiring attention.’ He arranged for ‘a very large pleasant room with a good bathroom that I can have for 100 lire a day, including service as well as found [full accommodation and meals], and this is better than anything I can get at this hotel [the Grand Hotel, Rome]’ (LGS 349–50). He had been living in various hotels at this time and had, as a result of inheritance, saving and the earnings of his books, more than enough money for his needs. John McCormick in his biography, George Santayana, speaks of his ‘substantial estate’ (508) and ‘Stevens’ errors in fact about Santayana’s circumstances’ (507). There was no poverty, only simplicity. Writing in ‘Imagination as Value’ (1948), Stevens sees Santayana’s life as a whole that he himself had made: Most men’s lives are thrust upon them. . . . There can be lives, nevertheless, which exist by the deliberate choice of those that live them . . . [I]t may be assumed that the life of Professor Santayana is a life in which the function of the imagination has had a function similar to its function in any deliberate work of art or letters. We have only to think of this present phase of it, in which, in his old age, he dwells in the head of the world, in the company of devoted women, in their convent, and in the company


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of familiar saints, whose presence does so much to make any convent an appropriate refuge for a generous and human philosopher. (CPP 733–4) For Stevens, Santayana had created his life like a poem. Three days after Santayana’s death, on 29 September 1952, Stevens wrote to Barbara Church: I grieve to hear of the death of George Santayana in Rome. Fifty years ago, I knew him well, in Cambridge, where he often asked me to come to see him. This was before he had definitely decided not to be a poet. It is difficult for a man whose whole life is thought to continue as a poet. The reason (like the law, which is only a form of the reason) is a jealous mistress. He seems to have gone to live at the convent, in which he died, in his sixties [sic], probably gave them all he had and asked them to keep him, body and soul. (L 761–2) Stevens apparently did not know that going to the Convent was one of Santayana’s deliberate choices, and had nothing to do with poverty or returning to the religion of his childhood (he was born a Catholic). Wilson had reported Santayana as saying ‘that he had lived there for two years without money’, and had emphasized the simplicity of the accommodation: ‘He occupied a single room, in which he both worked and slept. There was a table at his right with papers and books, and at his left a small bed, concealed by a screen, there was almost nothing else in the room’ (Europe without Baedeker 47, 43). Although Stevens may have misapprehended Santayana’s circumstances, there is no suggestion in the poem that he had altered his opinion of religion, and, in fact, Santayana’s views remained unchanged to the end. He writes to William James in 1890, ‘I doubt whether the earth supports a more genuine enemy of all the Catholic Church inwardly stands for than I do’, and to Father Matthew Hoehn who wanted to include him in his book, Catholic Authors, he replied in 1939: I have never been a practicing Catholic, and my views in philosophy and history are incompatible with belief in any revelation. It would therefore be wholly misleading to classify me among ‘Catholic Authors’. . . . I think that all religious ideas are merely symbolical; but I think the same of the ideas of science, and even of the senses: so that the way is cleared for faith in deciding which set of symbols one will trust. (LGS 337) Along the same lines he states in My Host the World: ‘Religion is valid poetry infused into common life. It is not a revelation truer than perception or than science’ (Persons and Places 492). Like Santayana, Stevens believes that all

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knowledge is equally problematic. The idea that religion is a set of symbols that can be accepted if one wishes, but is not ‘a scientific revelation or history of literal facts’ (ibid.), is very close to Stevens’ supreme fiction and this is certainly one of the things that attracted him to Santayana. Both men attempted to articulate their disbelief so as to make it into something in which they could believe. An unsigned review of Santayana’s Interpretations of Poetry and Religion in The Harvard Advocate (24 March 1900) that James Longenbach thinks is very probably by the young Stevens declares: ‘ “religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretensions to be dealing with matters of fact” ’ (qtd in Longenbach 18–19). Stevens writing to Gilbert Montague in 1943 apropos of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ says: ‘Underlying it is the idea that, in the various predicaments of belief, it might be possible to yield, or to try to yield, ourselves to a declared fiction’ (L 443). This is like Coleridge’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ that he uses to describe the spectator at a play. (The theatre is a common metaphor for the world in Stevens.) The decision to write about Santayana is a decision to write about Europe and a European who after living and working in the United States for years had to return, but not to his own country (like Nietzsche and Lenin, he is not on his native ground). Santayana, moreover, had recognized Stevens as a poet when Stevens was a student. A minor poet with a certain standing, he had written a poem in reply to one of Stevens’. Most important, Santayana is the choice of a man who had done his work, accomplished what he had set out to do, and then decided how he would spend the rest of his life and where he would die. Stevens was himself 72 when he wrote the poem and obviously thought about his own death. Santayana is, like Nietzsche, a philosopher who is known primarily as a stylist rather than for his ideas (although the two are not separable). Stevens saw them as similar. To Barbara Church he uses them as an example of ‘the style of particular philosophers as, say, Nietzsche or Santayana’ (L 722). Of Santayana’s prose, he writes in ‘A Collect of Philosophy’ (1951): [T]he exquisite and memorable way in which he has always said things has given so much delight that we accept what he says as we accept our own civilization. His pages are part of the douceur de vivre and do not offer themselves for sensational summary. (CPP 854) ‘Description Without Place’ wants certainty about the reality of the physical world. ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’ entertains the notion of belief in the reality of the metaphysical world, but stops on the threshold. The two poems share a concern for the future and accept the problematic, the uncertain and the unknowable. They are both built on an opposition: the first, between place and description, the second, between Rome and heaven. The


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philosopher is seen, like the poet, as simultaneously ‘living in two worlds’ (CPP 433). ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’ is an austere poem, plain and abstract. The philosopher is old in the title, but Stevens employs the word nowhere else in the poem, although it is about old age in an old city, and about ending. The poem starts with what seems a simple statement of fact, of how the figures in the street appear, but which assumes heaven to be a reality, although in the fourth stanza Rome and heaven are ‘The extreme of the known’ and ‘the extreme / Of the unknown’ (CPP 432). In the poem the extremes meet. Stevens uses language to create a sense of space, ‘men growing small’ at the opening, ‘total grandeur’ at the close. The space is larger and emptier because there are so very few objects in the poem: bed, books, chair, candle, pillow, room, all without adjectives, undescribed. The Convent of the Blue Nuns is not mentioned. The ‘bird-nest arches’ and ‘rain-stained vaults’ stand out because of the unusual adjectives (CPP 433), but it is not certain that they are part of the Convent. Only ‘moving nuns’ are seen and ‘newsboys’ mutterings’ heard. There are no other people, except the anonymous ‘figures’. The ‘smell / Of medicine, a fragrantness not to be spoiled’ stands out (CPP 432). There is nothing else like it in the poem and it makes us vividly conscious of the absence of sensuous detail. The poem is an argument full of abstractions, abstractions in apposition with other abstractions, about an abstraction. The poet tells the philosopher to ‘Be orator’, an idea of rhetoric and public speaking that we find throughout Stevens’ work. Stevens is keenly aware of the artifice and artificial in language, so he modifies his injunction: Be orator but with an accurate tongue And without eloquence . . . (CPP 433) This is a way of giving added force to his ‘total grandeur’. The space in the poem resembles a perspective drawing in which two lines converge on a point on the horizon – ‘Two parallels become one, a perspective’ (CPP 432). There are two Romes: the actual Rome which is the threshold and the ‘merciful Rome’ which is the Roman Catholic Church, the religion made more definite by being presented as of the city. Both heaven and religion are beyond the actual Rome, but the poet delicately avoids identifying the religion and heaven. ‘On the threshold of heaven’, as the philosopher approaches death, ‘the figures in the street / Become the figures of heaven’ (CPP 432). This ‘majestic movement’ happens automatically, as a matter of course, at the start of the poem. ‘Unintelligible absolution’ is what the men sing. We do not know if it is granted. According to the third stanza, these changes are easy. For the old philosopher the threshold is double: the city of Rome and the Roman Catholic religion, although ‘that more merciful Rome’ is beyond, in

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an undefined space of its own, like that of heaven. The two are ‘alike in the make of the mind’, venerable man-made structures elaborated over time. The city is mind-made because, like all reality, it is at a remove from perception. Together the two Romes give us a long view, ‘a perspective’ in which human beings are both small and large, insignificant and significant. Stevens is concerned, first, with what cannot be seen, ‘Things dark on the horizons of perception’, the large generalities of a possible life after death, and then with the rudimentary, immediate details of the philosopher’s room. He moves from the macrocosm to the microcosm, but the room and its contents are treated so vaguely, so generally, that they are almost of the same quality as the philosophical abstractions. The ‘newsboys’ muttering’ becomes ‘another murmuring’. The smell of the medicine drifts off with the ellipses. The objects, nuns and philosopher are assimilated to ‘the shape of Rome’, ‘the ancient circles of shapes’ and become ever more tenuous, ‘beneath the shadow of a shape // In a confusion’ that includes a ‘portent’ and ‘a moving transparence’ (CPP 432–3). All of this joins ‘a hovering excellence’ to end as ‘the celestial possible’. The candle ‘evades the sight’. The simplest, most definite objects in the poem vanish before our eyes. The poet demonstrates with these examples how things dark on the horizon of perception become an indefinite future. The ‘fortune of the spirit’ is ‘beyond the eye’ and ‘Not of its sphere’, ‘and yet not far beyond’ (CPP 432). By keeping close to the ordinary furnishings of the philosopher’s room, Stevens attempts to reduce the distance to heaven. The poem changes in the seventh stanza with a direct address to the philosopher. He is presented as on the threshold of sleep, at the edge of consciousness, ‘half-asleep’, ‘dozing in the depths of wakefulness’, as if more in touch with what is beyond (CPP 433). He is instructed to speak the truth about the pity that we recognize and remember in his room and situation, the pathos that his life should come to end with so few things in so small a space. Yet this is the pathos of every life. The poet tells him to speak accurately and plainly so that in the ‘illuminated large’ of the abstractions of this double threshold, we feel the ‘veritable small’, that is our own insignificance, and behold ourselves in him. The poet then describes the philosopher and elaborates on his situation. He is divided ‘living in two worlds’ and both ‘impenitent’ and ‘penitent’ (about what is not entirely clear). For a poem that touches on the possibility of a life after death, there are strangely, and, of course, deliberately very few religious words: heaven, absolution, perhaps wings in context, nuns, maybe celestial, and penitent. Stevens has not repudiated ‘Sunday Morning’, although he can no longer be consoled by the natural world which is totally absent here. His religion is as secular as he can make it, recalling Marcel Raymond’s remark that after the work of the philosophes, poetry assumes the function of religion and becomes an irregular metaphysics (3). The important ideas are space, light, architecture and structure.


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The philosopher is presumably ‘impenitent’ about the world and his life in it, and accepts it for what it is – a totally un-Christian view. He does not take back his philosophy. His penitence about a next world seems to be an admixture of his doubts about its existence and regret for the misery of this world. Penitence goes with ‘absolution’. What, if anything, is to be forgiven is not stated and, except for the objects in the room and the newsboys, the poem is removed from any details of ordinary life or behaviour. The lines that follow are also difficult. Stevens insists here, as he does repeatedly in his poetry, on our poverty. Judging from the corpus of his work, we are poor in our knowledge of reality, knowing only the vagaries of sense-data, description without place, and deprived of any certain, definite contact with the real; and it is speech on these subjects ‘that seeks us out the most’ and of which we have an insatiable need. ‘The greatest poverty’, Stevens says in ‘Esthétique du Mal’, ‘is not to live / In a physical world’ (CPP 286). The philosopher is ‘Impatient’ for ‘grandeur’, yet the only grandeur that he finds is in the misery of human life, the ‘Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead’, the poverty of not living completely in a physical world. The poverty is ‘older than the oldest speech of Rome’ (a city famous for orators) and the ‘tragic accent of the scene’. He finds ‘it / Only in misery’. The bleakness of this statement is hidden in the many modifying and abstract clauses of a long, complex sentence that runs over two stanzas, stands as counterpart to the wished-for ‘total grandeur at the end’ and negates it, as in a different way does ‘The veritable small’. Small is true. The misery of the poverty is fundamental. Afflatus is breath, traditionally the inspiration of genius, divine or of the muse. Here misery and ruin are the inspiration, ruin in the sense of the incomplete, transitory and temporary nature of our knowledge and lives, a knowledge that is always falling apart and constantly has to be remade, and a body that inevitably fails. That produces the ‘Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead’. Why Stevens focuses on the last drop of blood is not completely clear, unless it is the final sign of life and from the ‘deepest’, most profound part of the person, his or her quintessential being. Poverty’s speech is ‘older than the oldest speech of Rome’ because this poverty and misery have been part of the human condition from an early time. The tragedy is that it is inescapable. The philosopher speaks the tragedy ‘without speech’, as if he is a man made out of words, a description without place. Despite (or because of?) his weakness and half-wakefulness, the philosopher assumes a heroic role in the poem. He is a major man like ‘MacCullough’ in ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ (CPP 334) who represents us, simply by being who he is. We behold ourselves in him and hear his voice – presumably even when he speaks ‘without speech’. For Stevens, poverty’s speech does not need words. The old philosopher is a true captain, not a ‘Crude’ one, and curiously invulnerable, who stands for the majesty of the ancient architecture of Rome, its arches

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and vaults – supporting structures that carry a building’s weight, as he carries the weight of our condition. As at the end of the fourth stanza when we hear the newsboys and smell the medicine, at the beginning of the last four stanzas, the ‘external world comes near’ (CPP 305). The sounds drift in from the outside and the buildings outside are remembered – perception and memory being set equal. ‘The life of the city never lets go, nor do you / Ever want it to’ (CPP 434). The world is always with us and we do not want to let it go. We do not want to die. The bells are ringing. They have to be church bells, yet Stevens avoids a specific religious reference. They impress their choruses and choirs upon the old philosopher. For the poet who interprets their ringing, they stand for ‘mercy’, presumably of ‘that more merciful Rome’ – again the idea of pardon and forgiveness. They ring in order that mercy is not ‘a mystery / Of silence’, but something that everyone knows, and their sound is both music and the repetition of ‘solemn names’. They do not want the philosopher to receive more from ‘any solitude of sense’ – the phrase perfectly denotes Stevens’ sense of human loneliness and the disconnection of perception from the world – than from their ringing. The phrase, ‘reverberations clinging to whisper still’ that describes the bells’ fading vibrations and echoes, is one of the most beautiful in the poem. ‘Clinging to whisper’ is a wonderful way of letting us hear the last vibrations and the play on the two senses of still gives us their continuing reverberation and their silence in a single word. Other than mercy, their message is not explicit. ‘It is a kind of total grandeur at the end’. It would seem to include the sounds that drift in, the remembered buildings, all the ‘life of the city’ that ‘never lets go’, an urban version of the deer, quail and pigeons in the final stanzas of ‘Sunday Morning’, completely secular, but with overtones of something more, the grandeur of a life almost completely lived with the grandeur of the final aspirations of its last moments at the end. It is one kind of grandeur; the ‘kind of’ takes away some of the rhetoric and makes it more ordinary. Every visible thing is enlarged by the grandeur of this moment, and yet everything is no more than itself, unchanged. There is nothing metaphysical here. The moment is one of heightened perception, particularly intense and vivid, a moment of illumination in which nothing is disclosed or promised, no intimations of immortality. The philosopher stops upon the threshold, he does not cross it. The total edifice appears to be the room with its meagre furnishings and surrounding Rome, and, looking at the last two lines, to include his books, ‘all his words’. Santayana’s work is assimilated to his life. Everything comes together at the end to form a whole that he has ‘Chosen’. ‘The unexamined life’, says Socrates, ‘is not worth living.’ The old philosopher is presented as a man who has decided where and in what circumstances his life will end. As ‘an inquisitor of structures’, this choice is in keeping with his character and his work. Choice goes with design. The old philosopher is true to himself. What emerges from the poem is Stevens’ deep need of structure, relation,


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connection, order. Only Stevens would think of a bed, chair, book and candle in terms of architecture – ‘theatre’ and ‘pillared porch’ – or associate the philosopher with ‘the naked majesty’ of arches and vaults, or declare that the domes of Rome ‘are the architecture of your bed’. Threshold is also an architectural term. The metaphors are architectural because Stevens wants them to be strong, definite, solid, visible and palpable. There is also a need for unity – ‘total grandeur’ and ‘a total edifice’ – and for wholeness. The philosopher as he stops on the threshold is as if united and at one with ‘the design of all his words’ – not simply with ‘all his words’ but with their design. The word asserts the unity of the work and its purpose. At this final moment, it is as if the design materializes, ‘takes form / And frame’ and creates yet more structure to encompass and hold the philosopher. The balancing of materializing (taking ‘form and frame’) and realizing is vital. Stevens in his poetry is constantly pushing his language to make intangibles tangible. At the end of the poem, it is as if the old philosopher’s words (even those he speaks ‘without speech’) give purpose and meaning to his life. The moment is exactly like that in ‘Description Without Place’ in which the poet imagines a change ‘immenser’ than his metaphors ‘in which being would // Come true’ (CPP 298). There the moment is defined. ‘[W]e are content’ and the world is ‘an immediate whole’ (my italics). Here the moment is not defined. We are left on the threshold with a moment of realization and that moment is secular. Whatever Stevens’ understanding or misunderstanding of Santayana’s situation and whatever his own wishes, they do not cause him to abandon his scepticism. Heaven never comes closer than the adumbration of an as if and in the poem’s final two stanzas the only religious word is nuns. The realization involves the philosopher’s thinking and writing, as if suddenly he understands his work in a new way and feels whole. The final moment is of the present not of the future, the achievement of a writer’s life – as if his work is his future. Toward the end of his career, Stevens wrote an increasing number of poems whose subject is America or which have American settings. The exotic had less and less appeal and it seems as if he were no longer interested in even imagining that he might one day visit Europe. It was a more urgent concern to feel that he was deeply rooted in his home ground. ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’ is one of the few late poems with a European setting. Given that the poem is about Santayana and that Santayana did retire at the end of his life to the Convent of the Blue Nuns, no other setting was possible if the poem were to be true, but it is possible that Santayana’s retirement in Rome was one of the things that attracted Stevens to the subject. The poem after all is about a man who, in a sense, returns to be on his home ground and a participant in his own culture. Apart from this, the force of the European references can be measured by substituting American ones. If instead of Rome, we read Hartford or Pittsburgh, the whole poem changes. The historical perspective is shortened by a thousand or more years. There is no empire or nation reaching

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back into time, rather a primeval forest and the many very different native cultures of America. The Catholic religion becomes a minority religion. The arches, vaults and domes are imitations. Everything is newer. The sense of a long history, as from time immemorial that merges into a possible infinite future time is absent. Europe in the poetry of Stevens is most often a metaphor for the world: he knows it exists, but his knowledge of it is wholly imaginary. Nonetheless, he bought pictures from Paris by mail and his friends travelling in Europe sent him postcards. As he says in ‘Description Without Place’, we would live in ‘flat appearance’, ‘Except for delicate clinkings not explained’ (CPP 297). Our certainties fluctuate and our theories are constantly being upset by unexplained events; delicate shows their subtlety, clinkings the dissonant, unharmonious nature of this experience. After having found a large number of European reviews in Wittenborn’s bookshop in New York and bought several of them, staggered by the cost, Stevens writes to Henry Church on 6 August 1946: ‘However, they were worth it because one never realizes how completely we seem to belong to Europe until we attempt to get along without it’ (L 531). That he did attempt to get along without it shows how thoroughly he thought through his identity as an American poet.

Notes 1. For a sustained discussion of the poem, see my ‘Description without Place’. 2. Wilson tells the story of a comrade who came to see Lenin and ‘ “began talking excitedly and incoherently about chariots filled with sheaves of corn and beautiful girls standing in the chariots” ’. Lenin stayed with him while his wife ‘ “got a psychiatrist, who said the man was going crazy from starvation. Later, he tied stones to his feet and neck and drowned himself in the Seine” ’ (Finland 534–5). Stevens’ chariots may originate in this story, but as he has omitted any reference to the sheaves or girls and it is the man who drowns and not the chariots, I suggest the reference is to the story of Pharaoh and the crossing of the Red Sea from Exodus. 3. On Stevens’ relation to religion and his ‘conversion’, see my The Poetry of Wallace Stevens 295–9. 4. I remember the photographs, but cannot remember where or when I saw them. I believe they were in Life (they are different from the one-page article referenced below). Wilson’s essay was reprinted in Europe without Baedeker (1947). Stevens might have read the essay either in The New Yorker or in the book, but we have no proof he read either, only the probability.

Works cited Eliot, T. S. To Criticize the Critic. London: Faber, 1965. Life 7 Aug. 1944: 40. Longenbach, James. Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.


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McCormick, John. George Santayana. New York: Knopf, 1987. Raymond, Marcel. De Baudelaire au surréalisme. Paris: José Corti, 1940. Rehder, Robert. The Poetry of Wallace Stevens. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988. Rehder, Robert. ‘Description without Place: The Language of Poetry and the Language of Philosophy’. REAL VI (1988/89): 226–52. Rehder, Robert and Patrick Vincent. Introduction. American Poetry: Whitman to the Present. Ed. Robert Rehder and Patrick Vincent. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2006. 11–20. Santayana, George. The Letters of George Santayana. Ed. Daniel Cory. London: Constable, 1955. (Abbreviated as LGS.) Santayana, George. Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography. Ed. William Holzberger and Herman Saatkamp, Jr. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986. Stevens, Holly. Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1977. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966. Wilson, Edmund. Europe without Baedeker. 1947. Rpt London: Hogarth Press, 1986. Wilson, Edmund. To the Finland Station. 1940. Rpt London: Penguin, 1991. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979.



A PHILOSOPHICAL CONVERSATIONS


4 Stevens and the Crisis of European Philosophy Charles Altieri

What, if anything, is there still to be gained from situating Stevens within the context of early twentieth-century European philosophy rather than American philosophy? I cannot offer a general answer, but I can elaborate the speculative gain involved in relating Stevens to Edmund Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences, written in the period 1934–37, the same years in which Stevens reorients his poetic career. I am aware of no evidence that Stevens ever read this book. Yet the line of thinking it develops seems to me closely woven into Stevens’ sense of the world. This is not a matter only of Stevens and Husserl having parallel ideas. Husserl’s capacity to blend the transcendental and the elemental in his book helps us see what is philosophically dynamic and engaging about Stevens’ sense of the distinctive tasks his poetry had to perform (at least the poetry after Harmonium). There seem to me two major reasons for pursuing such an affinity. That Stevens is engaged in a metaphysical project may not be startling news. That he does so by elaborating and then modifying the relation of a transcendental ego to the Husserlian life-world is already considerably more promising as a topic, if only because that makes clear why his poetry has to concentrate on the agency of the self as producing and responding to the world. Stevens simply could not do the work in which he was most interested, and which was arguably most important to his specific culture, if he could have been satisfied with the motifs contemporary criticism emphasizes – that is, with the description of actual phenomena, or the dialogical inclusion of other voices, or attention to social formations and the dispositions of power they establish. Stevens’ metaphysical talk about the imagination and reality seems old news at best, evasions of the pressure of reality at the worst. But Stevensian metaphysics is not reducible to such themes, especially if read through Husserl, who emphasizes how the transcendental ego is deployed and provides a ground for speculating on the role of the affects attributed to the stances such an ego takes. Husserl helps us see how Stevens does not simply talk about metaphysical issues but actually makes poetry do a kind of work best treated as metaphysical. 61

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Philosophical Conversations

Second, reading parts of Stevens through Husserl offers a possible polemical stance that might deepen our sense of why it matters to ask how European materials might affect our interpretations of Stevens’ work. Formulating the question of ‘Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic’ should be tantamount to asking ourselves what aspects of Stevens are not addressed well if we confine ourselves to Stevens’ American contexts. We should remind ourselves that all national perspectives seem somewhat marginal to the study of a poet who emphasized the distinctive ‘level of truth’ at which the poet can be seen to ‘compose his poems’ (CPP 682). And we should continue to look for ways of criticizing the tendency to bind Stevens to American history and American philosophy without insisting on corresponding European constraints on his, and our, imaginings. In particular, I want to propose Husserlian phenomenology here as a more sensitive and less jingoistic framework for talking about Stevens’ poetry than any model of pragmatism has provided. For Husserl ‘realizes’ how the ego is constructed in such a way as to allow us to talk about the dynamics of poetry rather than focusing on abstract claims about the imagination. That in turn better positions us to appreciate how the poems might address various cultural crises ultimately shared by Americans and Europeans alike. Husserl shared the sense, widespread among early twentieth-century philosophers, that the successes of science had created a dangerous situation: as scientific procedures increasingly became the only way of securing what can be claimed as objective knowledge, the Cartesian domain of selfreflective consciousness was relegated to mere subjectivity and so divorced from any claim to value or significance for humanity in general.1 But his specific way of engaging this crisis is distinctive. Where Henri Bergson or William James would give up on metaphysics in favour of a new psychology, Husserl adapts Kant’s transcendental perspective – not to secure categorical reason but to provide access to aspects of specific form-giving powers shared by all human beings who can be said to participate in the same ‘life-world’. He also develops a new psychology but asks it still to do the work of metaphysical speculation. Husserl calls this phase of his philosophy ‘transcendental subjectivism’ (97). Its basic premiss is that science’s version of objectivism is ‘naïve’ because it depends on what can be represented by its methods rather than inquiring into how the process of representation is grounded in the life-world of subjects (96). Philosophy has to discover what our capacity for representation involves so that there can be a shared world: we have to know how we develop orientations that establish a horizon of other people and other attentions as ‘part’ of the framework establishing the object status of phenomena (108). This requires a transcendental subject because any empirical subject we analyze will be simply a part of the world, not a condition for there to be world in the first place. Scientific objectification, on the other hand, treats subject positions as causally determined by perceptions or by

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interests. Science assumes that the subject is caught up entirely in practical ends. It cannot ‘bracket’ its own habits of seeing and so cannot envision the subject as the source of possibilities for a world. But philosophy can establish such brackets by withholding the assumptions producing the ‘validities’ or general practical expectations given by the practices we trust (135). For this frees reflection to articulate a ‘general structure’ within experience, ‘to which everything that exists relatively is bound, although the structure is not itself relative’ (139). Imagine situations where we orient ourselves by feeling or where we construct objects by combining several sensory domains. Here the subject has to be constructed because it frames objectivity, but cannot be made the object of a coherent predicate. This is the subject of the ‘life-world’, a subject requiring a different kind of objectivity from the objectivity of science. The objectivity of the life-world is established by a transcendental judgment about what is involved in ‘the world’s own manner of being’ (123) so that it proves compatible with human existence. Different subjects will realize these powers differently, but the powers themselves will be recognizable across those differences – otherwise we could not have any sense of one world. Yet that sense of one world is fundamental because there is at the basis of our experience a sense that ‘the world . . . does not exist as an entity, as an object, but exists with such uniqueness that the plural makes no sense when applied to it’ (143). For example, in putting sensations together one might stress sound or sight or smell, but other people develop knowledge that such preferences are all part of one world. The most important aspect of Husserl’s theorizing for Stevens would have been (had he read him) the way that metaphysics and psychology fuse. What is objective is the ability of subjects to constitute a world, or, perhaps better, what is objective is the inability of subjects at some level even to imagine the world being plural. Then, because this world cannot be an object, Husserl can make a startling move whose consequences have yet to be worked out. In the life-world, manner replaces matter as the new objectivity: Let us now shape this into a new universal direction of interest; let us establish a consistent universal interest in the ‘how’ of the manners of givenness and in the onta [Husserl’s Greek term for ‘beings’] themselves, not straightforwardly but rather as objects in respect to their ‘how’ – that is with our interest exclusively and constantly directed toward how, throughout the alteration of relative validities, subjective appearances and opinions, the coherent, universal validity world – the world comes into being for us . . . (Husserl 144) Husserl did not influence Stevens. But he makes a more important contribution to our understanding of Stevens: he makes articulate and significant

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various features of Stevens’ poetics for which Stevens himself lacked the technical language and the appropriate historical perspective.2 Consider Stevens’ own commitment to manner rather than matter as stated in ‘The Latest Freed Man’: ‘I suppose there is A doctrine to this landscape. Yet, having just Escaped from the truth, the morning is color and mist, Which is enough: the moment’s rain and sea, The moment’s sun . . . It is how he gives his light. It is how he shines, Rising upon the doctors in their beds And on their beds. . . . ’ [This ellipsis is Stevens’; the others are mine.] 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 . . . 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. (CPP 187) Stevens here is a metaphysician fascinated by how the feel for being ‘without a description of to be’ can transform the ant of the self into an ox (while also recognizing the precariousness of this transformation). Such fascination trumps any affiliation with America: the psychological transformations derived from our senses of being are more elemental conditions and much better suited to the ambitions of a philosophical poet than any commitment to nationality (although he also recognized that nationality will out, just as disposition will out). In fact this turn to psychology as a way of returning to metaphysical questions affords affinities not just with the range of European phenomenologists (extending to the Derrida of De l’esprit)3 but also with the Wittgenstein who spoke of being ‘not interested in constructing a building, so much as having a perspicuous view of the foundations of all possible buildings’ (7).


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My case for Stevens as metaphysician now ironically forces me to play the pragmatist: what concrete practical differences does it make in our reading of Stevens to stress this metaphysical strain rather than specify various American features of his work? I suggest two basic differences in our reading, each with several corollaries. The first involves the possibility of fleshing out Stevens’ claims about the imagination by emphasizing the dynamic features they produce in his poetry; the second allows us to specify how the poems in The Rock render the transcendental ego a more intimate, more self-reflexive and more supple force than it had been in Stevens’ earlier efforts to make poetry engage ontological questions.4 The parallels between Husserl and Stevens make it clear how Stevens’ concept of, and feel for, the ‘imagination’ require focusing on the psychology of the transcendental ego within the life-world, even at the risk of alienating many poets and critics who prefer the more ‘meaty’ dynamics of social encounter.5 Here I must assume that the reader is familiar with Stevens’ repeated claims about the imagination and his consequent need to keep his concept as far as possible from what Lacan called the imaginary (and Simon Critchley, in the tradition of Coleridge, ‘fancy’).6 Imagination is distinctive in fact precisely because it requires a more concrete, more immediate and more capacious context for its operations than can be provided by any form of social analysis. Indeed that is why the concept depends on a transcendental ego that is not the self who experiences but the self whose affective being must be projected to explain the possibility of the experiences that we ‘realize’. That said, I must turn to my second topic: how Stevens’ metaphysical orientation takes a different turn in The Rock, a topic ultimately not separable from Stevens’ thinking about imagination. This story has to begin with how Stevens’ philosophical lyrics in the thirties and the forties faced an intense version of the problem all poets face when they want to be philosophical. The more faithful the lyric is to the ‘how’ of the transformations realized by the imagination, the more difficult it is to get any conceptual purchase on what may be shared among these transformations. So how does the poet honour the immediacy of imagination’s work while establishing something capable of influencing discursive understanding? For much of Stevens’ career after Harmonium he relied on a meditative style that could make generalization part of the process of imagination coming to terms with its own powers. That is why his version of Husserl’s transcendental ego becomes so important. That transcendental ego builds upon the forces that discrete moments reveal, so that these seem not simply casual discoveries but the realization of what is involved in the ego’s having a world at the most fundamental level of its existence. And then the poetry could allow extended discursive passages, since in effect they stage the ego trying to appreciate what it in fact reveals in its actions. One role the concept of transcendental ego can play is to serve as a reflective focus for the powers directly revealed in the working of the poem.

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However, this severely limits the options available to Stevens’ poetry and challenges it to elaborate inventions within a narrow range. In general his poems have to resist the appearance that they simply present a world perceived. Stevens’ worlds are always possible worlds, worlds projected by the transcendental ego as it orients imagination in relation to what a scene offers. Therefore, various distancing techniques are called for. He needs abstraction and playfulness and irony and constant self-reflexivity in order to maintain the distinctive space where ego is a power and an index of possibilities for constructing life-worlds rather than a needy agent in pursuit of specific ideologically charged desires. Analogously there is a strong desire to make the poetry itself not simply a mode of attunement to the world, but a mode of self-reflexively tracking how the linguistic choices also provide in themselves modes of power. Language not only describes, but also exemplifies the consequences of certain paths to the world. As figures of capable imagination Stevens’ lyrics not only bring vitality to what they encounter, they also establish means of intensifying or expanding mind’s role in the life-world. I still cannot describe this level of exemplification very well. I will call it second-order reflection because the focus is not on what the poem encounters, but on what it can exhibit of the mind’s possibilities by attending to how it is disposed in this encounter. Among Stevens’ several modes for exploring such self-consciousness I am especially interested in the way he deploys figures that take on importance because the process of the poem actually demonstrates the powers that the figures afford. I have written a good deal on how Stevens deploys ‘as’ in this way, and I have recently written about how that use of ‘as’ makes sense of the dual role of the figure of the ‘exponent’ – a referent for both the effort at discursive explanation and for the possibility of exponential increase in intensity by virtue of the poem’s handling of such exposition.7 I have to return to the topic again because this feature is one important aspect of what gets transformed in the last poems. Think of how this passage from ‘Examination of the Hero in a Time of War’ replaces argument by the intricate self-reflexive functions ‘as’ establishes. It is almost as if we had to hear ‘as’ in two ways – as a semantic operator clarifying the mind’s engagement with a particular line of argument and as a structural operator allowing poetry to elaborate how the poem’s hearing of its own language provides second-order reflections on possible principles of relationship it can establish within the domain of experience. The power gathered by our ability to use ‘as’ makes for a different principle of identification. In effect it replaces the need for building an explicit sense of heroic substance by sustaining a chain of metaphoric equations: It is not an image. It is a feeling. There is no image of the hero. There is a feeling as definition. How could there be an image, an outline,


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A design, a marble soiled by pigeons? The hero is a feeling, a man seen As if the eye was an emotion, As if in seeing we saw our feeling In the object seen and saved that mystic Against the sight, the penetrating, Pure eye. Instead of allegory, We have and are the man, capable Of his brave quickenings, the human Accelerations that seem inhuman. (CPP 248–9) The drama here is all in how we are led through different stages of thinking. Initially we are presented with sharp contrasts. After the feeling is separated from the image, a second contrast seems also to place on the feeling the burden of reconstituting those images once able to sustain the idea of heroism. Then the contrast makes the notion of image seem so remote that it must be entertained as a negative hypothetical. Perhaps the more abstract the reflection needed to maintain the idea of image, the more concrete the alternative becomes. So the poem considers itself freed to turn directly to the most proprioceptive of feelings. These feelings attach to the hero by virtue of their being engaged in the processes of thinking. Both the content and the form of the ‘as if’ constructions require first seeing our seeing as itself a charged activity, then recognizing that we can work through to significant secondorder feelings by refusing to let sight be consumed by its objects. Second-order feelings place the object within the frame afforded by the subject. With feeling so abstracted, and thereby made so concretely a part of the activity of seeing, the poet can propose a clear alternative to allegory, yet maintain the discursive distance and substantial generality sought by the allegorical impulse. Where allegory is necessary to give significance to objects of sight, the concluding lines here can locate the significant idealization simply in self-reflection on what the hypothetical emotions have brought to bear within the poem. Now the entire mode of apprehending the poem becomes a demonstration of what it claims about the hero. We can look beyond images to the feelings that we bring to them, and we can find in the quickening that occurs for those feelings the expansiveness and sense of possible lives that make heroism possible. While the poem cannot prove that heroes exist now, it does provide self-reflexive processes helping us recognize in ourselves desires and needs which will not let us accept any lesser state. This form of heroism does not rely on assumptions about character. It depends on just the opposite set of possibilities. It depends on recognizing and on willing the fluidity of individuation and hence of identification. Heroism lives because the poet’s instrument can give immediate and shareable content to large abstractions like ‘capable’ and ‘human’ by locating them

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in the quickenings that they elicit. It is these quickenings that give us the richest possible modes of identification as individuals and as social beings whose conative intensities prove here entirely shareable. And it is these quickenings that make sense of Stevens’ interest in the idea of the exponent, the discursive work that also functions as a means of raising material to more intense powers. The Rock manages to intensify this sense of human powers while making two major adjustments in how Stevens stages the transcendental ego and corresponding roles for the imagination. Traditionally any sign of will proves embarrassing to the work of meditation, just as a personal preface is an embarrassment to a work of philosophy. That fear of exposing neediness is a large reason why, before The Rock, Stevens had cultivated an imposing distance enabling the poems to turn playfully on themselves and, more important, to keep subjectivity at a transcendental distance that could hope to establish the possibility of world-constitution rather than struggle to impose particular interests.8 The Rock, in contrast, tries to replace that distance with a sense of intimacy between writer and the consciousness displayed in the poem. A highly condensed play of perspectives replaces the sense that a single project keeps control of the details within the poem. And there are several experiments in inhabiting voices rather than displaying them as discrete and limited parts of the world. In addition, Stevens absorbs second-order reflection within this sense of intimacy. The second-order reflection on what the transcendental subject makes possible as action within the poem becomes itself personalized so that it can stand for, and stand as, a kind of will that offers exemplary engagements with states of poverty and the necessities driving that poverty. Therefore the second-order dimension of experience turns psychological and personal: what matters is how the self-reflexive speaking can also constitute a mode of commitment taking responsibility for appreciating and for affirming what reality allows and refuses to allow the speaker’s sense of self. Imagination remains as important as it ever was, although now it is extended from the faculty by which we engage the world to the faculty by which we take our stand on why that engagement might matter. A quick example will help. This is ‘An Old Man Asleep’, the first poem in The Rock: The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping, now. A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity. The self and the earth – your thoughts, your feelings, Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot; The redness of your reddish chestnut trees, The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R. (CPP 427)


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This may appear like a simple poem of reconciliation to old age. But to appreciate the full resonance of that simplicity we have to engage some difficult questions. Why does the poem switch from the passive ‘are asleep’ to the more active ‘are sleeping’? Why represent this sleep by referring immediately not to persons, but to the two worlds of self and earth? Why make repetition so dominant in the poem, as if the river R were really the river of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return? Why connect the density of sound so closely to the motif of repetition? Why almost at the centre of the poem switch from third-person description to second-person address? And why does the poem so confidently identify with what apparently remains another person’s peculiar plot, only to conclude with an overwhelmingly general and abstract description? All these questions seem driven by the poem’s effort to develop a transparency compatible with intimacy, a difficult task because we usually equate intimacy with the kinds of identification that require leaps into what cannot be seen. So the poet must give the sleeping person a psychology, albeit a psychology so elemental that it can be adapted to the bare facts of the situation. That is why the poem moves from ‘asleep’ to ‘are sleeping’; why the sleeping is attributed to an elemental relation between self and earth; and why there is such smooth transition between that general condition and the terms of direct address, ‘your thoughts, your feelings’. It is as if the poem found a level of being where the condition of address and the condition of description were almost identical. But to realize this identity we need to open ourselves to a different order of being, one in which we can honour ‘your peculiar plot’ while recognizing that this plot consists largely of simply sleeping. But it is his sleeping, as all of the markers of address in the poem insist. All these general terms do not preclude address but solicit it, as if agency could be fully recognized and invoked by accepting the minimal yet completely expansive shift that occurs when something compels us to move from description to address. This movement seems to me to constitute a double affirmation – of the power that the individual still has to take responsibility for meanings, and of the sleeping itself as an acceptance of continuity with the rest of being – without complaint and without regret. The ease with which the poem combines levels of being has to be attributed to the person sleeping, if only because that ease is so connected to the repetitiousness that repetitiousness itself becomes an affective feature of the old man’s world. But even in this repetition there is evidence of the peculiar plot. How otherwise can we explain the resonance of ‘drowsy’ in this poem? The addition of ‘drowsy’ to the repetition of ‘river motion’ provides a little climax in relation to the poem’s use of address because even when the self is reduced almost to the object, it can elicit something excessive and at least somewhat distinctive. Here I have to admit that the distinction is mostly on the level of sound, since ‘drowsy’ so exaggerates the o sounds in the line that it takes the line itself beyond description to

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an affirmation of peculiar presence. But that seems to me an utterly brilliant means of expressing how pervasive the sense of human presence can become as the unreal takes up active residence within the real at its most elemental. Here I want to compare my analysis briefly to that of Simon Critchley. The most important reason for doing so is that Critchley’s recent book, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, is by far the clearest and most elemental rendering of Stevens’ general poetics. Critchley brings a wide philosophical framework to bear and he is a very persuasive writer, so his arguments are likely to prove influential. This likely influence becomes disturbing when one thinks as I do that what underlies Critchley’s reading of the late poems is perhaps the only model of value on which many contemporary philosophers trained in European traditions can agree. I refer to the ideal of ‘letting be’ and a corresponding eagerness to celebrate what manages to resist the ego’s demands and the rhetorician’s skills. I think this model is neither sufficiently rich in its affirmations nor sufficiently dark in its sense of tragedy to be adequate to late Stevens. (The appropriate sense of tragedy has to involve finding an aspect of the will that can come to terms with necessity.) Finally, Critchley’s claim that ‘no one appears to have picked up the shift of philosophical weight to be found in these poems’ (63) proves an irresistible challenge for my attempting to develop why it matters to read Stevens in a Husserlian light. Critchley’s basic argument about these late poems is bold and sharp. The Rock is driven by two basic correlated desires. Stevens wants to show one can give up a sense that the ego matters while retaining the assertive powers of poetry: ‘the moment of the ego’s assertion, in swelling up to fill a universe without god, is also the point at which it shrinks to insignificance’ (87). (No more oxen out of ants here.) And given this diminishing of the ego, the status of the object in lyric poetry has to change. Reading Stevens’ ‘cure of the ground’ as ‘the desire to be cured of the desire for poetry’ (83), Critchley argues that in a new realism ‘poetry can be brought closer to the plain sense of things, to things in the remoteness from us and our intentions’ (84).9 Perhaps the best way to challenge Critchley’s view is to suggest that he stresses only what seems the subject-matter and therefore severely underplays the ways in which the subject-matter still relies on how the poems establish figures of capable imagination. Critchley emphasizes the situations the late poems face rather than the situatings the poems afford if we read them as exemplary acts of mind. Therefore he more or less ignores formal aspects of the poems and does not even ask how Stevens may be altering his vision of how he can make relevant for experience what these second-order aspects dramatize. In my view these poems do not want to escape poetry but to test its power to build modes of response adequate to the stripped-down world the poems confront. That is why I want to stress how often perspectives change in these last poems or voices get introduced as conditions of response and will in relation to how things appear.10


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Had I world enough and time I would turn here to ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’ because this poem is probably Stevens’ richest in composing a theatrical space for the encounter with elemental things. This space is defined by an intricate dialogue – literally between ‘we’ and ‘you’, and figuratively between very close focus on ‘a confusion of bed and books’ and the speculative distance that can search for ‘the human end in the spirit’s greatest reach’. In developing this space the poem makes Stevens’ most powerful statement of how formal relations composed by this search afford an exemplary state of will. The closing movement of the poem first returns to the particular context of Santayana’s room against the backdrop of the bells of Rome. Then the poem expands to register how the bells remain audible yet their force requires the reach only imagination can provide: It is a kind of total grandeur at the end, With every visible thing enlarged and yet No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns, The immensest theatre, the pillared porch, The book and candle in your ambered room, Total grandeur of a total edifice, Chosen by an inquisitor of structures For himself. He stops upon this threshold, As if the design of all his words takes form And frame from thinking and is realized. (CPP 434) Will is how thinking and realizing become one, raising the world to theatre while simultaneously reducing the world to transparency. Therefore, it is not a major exaggeration to suggest that Stevens’ entire career might be summarized as the exploration of the founding difference between ‘real’ and ‘realized’. What changes is the gradual shift from what imagination does to what people can do because of the imagination’s power to create theatre while resisting the temptation to let that theatre present fictional plots. Given the limits of space for this essay, I will concentrate on ‘The Plain Sense of Things’ because Critchley often invokes it, because it is of a manageable length, and because I want to test my reading of the poem: After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. It is difficult even to choose the adjective For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.

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The great structure has become a minor house. No turban walks across the lessened floors. The greenhouse never so badly needed paint. The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side. A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition In a repetitiousness of men and flies. Yet the absence of the imagination had Itself to be imagined. The great pond, The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves, Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see, The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, Required, as a necessity requires. (CPP 428) The best way to see what is distinctive in this poem is to contrast it with ‘The Snow Man’. That poem had two basic commitments, starkly realized. One was to define as cleanly as possible a world reduced to what imposes ‘a mind of winter’. The other was to make manifest the continuing presence of some kind of synthetic force that in fact could serve as the minding of that winter because it has the power to contain the entire scene in an elaborate single sentence. ‘The Plain Sense of Things’ offers neither that concentrated reduction of the scene nor that particular model of compositional power. Instead, the pacing is much slower, the language no longer driven by a single syntactic structure. Why? What is it about the absence of imagination that Stevens can render in this mode that he could not in the earlier poem? Both poems treat the ‘inert savoir’ as if it were a response to a world in which it is impossible for adjectives to enhance being: being seems deprived of any qualities that relieve its absolute thereness. ‘The Plain Sense of Things’ also has to contend with a sense of history (‘A fantastic effort has failed’) that prevents it from realizing the kind of present tense established by the single synthetic sentence of ‘The Snow Man’. So in the later poem the mind keeps on doing the work of comparison, unwilling or unable to give up on the possibility of still being able to choose adjectives even if they have to take negative form. For even when the adjectives fail, the mind seems capable of varying the modes by which it views this bleakness. At this negative centre, even the silence turns out to elicit analogies. None of these analogies has transformative power. Yet the entire series makes the absence of imagination less a fact to be registered than a condition to be inhabited by observing what it elicits. After choice is mentioned, the


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poem turns swiftly to the transformation of a ‘great structure’ into a ‘minor house’, a measuring of loss that soon generates a strange form of negation: ‘No turban walks across the lessened floors’. Then there is a second comparison based on physical observation, and, finally, a bleak generalization about failure that in its turn generates further analogies. It seems that the imagination must describe the negative as well as the positive, so that the sense of absence of imagination becomes the imagination’s feel for its present situation. Negatives populate scenes so that we can feel a non-presence within them. Then with the abstract statement that ‘the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined’, the mind tries to articulate its own heightened response to what turn out to be its own figures. By the time the poem utters this abstract generalization it is putting into the mode of necessity what it had already discovered on the order of simple description. It is entering the domain where will is called upon. Not surprisingly, this generalization makes a major change in the poem. It challenges the discursive mode to handle a shift from describing a situation to describing a mental state while maintaining the same distance and flatness it had directed toward the scene. Stevens’ response to that challenge is magnificent. He turns to ‘The great pond, / The plain sense of it’, even though no pond has been mentioned. Consequently the pond hovers between one imagined as actual and one that exists primarily as part of a metaphor for how the absence of imagination can be imagined. Projected description and self-referential metaphoric reach become strangely identical. This identity is celebrated in the great figure of the ‘rat come out to see’. Again the rat could be part of the imagined scene. But it also could be the mind’s figure for its own pushing itself on the scene so as to find ways to figure the absence of imagination. The rat parallels the mind’s uncomfortable but somehow fated presence as witness to this desolation, and as one more feature of the desolation that has to be imagined. Now, though, ‘imagination’ is no longer an abstract term. It becomes just what can encompass an identification with how this rat emerges in this situation. Appreciating the rat requires recognizing why any analogue with a human observer would limit the poem. Confronted with this scene, the most the mind can do is compose an emblem for its own ‘estrangedness’ in a bizarrely intimate way. By having a figure of consciousness that is also a figure of non-identity with the self, the poem can encompass the scope of the poverty it confronts. Yet for this knowledge to take hold, the poem also has to go beyond the figure of the rat to a more capacious mode of agency. That figure binds the mind to pure contingency: the poem gives no reason why the rat emerges, nor does it explain why the figure seems so apt for the situation. Nonetheless the bond to that contingency seems not contingent at all: all this had to be imagined. As the mind seems forced to confront absolute contingency, it reaches also for a corresponding accommodation to necessity.

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The daunting nature of that task becomes the poem’s richest evidence for why it has to call upon imagination. Only imagination could establish the theatrical terms by which there can be figures for the viewing of this poverty. And only imagination can bring to bear on this poverty a sense of it as inseparable from our destiny as human beings. Needing to pursue a plain sense of things in this most un-plain way is the price we pay for having the investments we do in recognizing and appreciating our situations. But it is also our glory, so long as we can imagine imagining a quasi-identification with this rat as a basic aspect of that glory. That imagining provides an instrument for coming to terms with a fatality too comprehensive and abstract to be engaged by discursive reasoning. Figures are absolutely necessary for dealing with the plainest possible sense of things. And figures require a version of agency capable of directing these figures – both cognitively and affectively – hence the role the second-order considerations about consciousness have to play in the poem. ‘The Snow Man’ could rely on its single sentence in order to establish how the mind might be adequate even to this bleak situation. Ultimately, lucidity is possible. Here the situation is quite different. There certainly can be a parallel movement toward containing and recasting the series of reflections elicited by the plain sense of things. But even a mobile Stevensian sentence is not the appropriate vehicle. Rather than rely on a single sentence, this poem can only prevent the absence from dominating the sense of imagination by bringing to bear an even more plastic power, the power provided by the ‘as’. That power brings to bear a range of interpretive contexts that seem inseparable from the process of self-reflection, even as they become sufficiently abstract to prevent any single image of the self from taking form. And here that power gathers the self-reflexive dimension characteristic of Stevens’ poetry to perform a second-order task in practical life. First, there is the simple assertion of what we might call a mode of vision: all this had to be imagined in the mode that necessity requires. All this has to be attuned to the contingent emergence of the rat as the locus for realizing a bleakness that itself may be elemental rather than contingent. But this sense of necessity cannot be encompassed by description. We have to reflect on what is afforded by the series of ‘as’ expressions as they connect the contingent and the necessary. Our thinking and our figuring all become aspects of recognizing that we are not so much describing the absence of imagination as ritually manifesting where we are positioned when we make that attempt. We have to align entirely with necessity, but at a distance, in another tree, provided by everything that our ability to use ‘as’ makes visible. Such use proves most important for its giving sharp content to the ‘we’ that begins as only a hopeful assertion in the poem’s first stanza. This ‘we’ defines our power to adjust to necessity, and it embodies the power to feel what one shares with others even as one is most sharply confronted with one’s own isolation. The power to generalize proves inseparable from the second-order


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power to see, such that it takes generalizing in order to stage the absence of imagination in its full theatrical presence. Yet for all this generalization, this power can only be realized by the individual’s accepting the condition of our fully fleshing out the worlds that ‘as’ produces – namely that each of us align with the sense of necessity as an aspect of the life-world we share. ‘All this’ functions almost like the entire sentence in ‘The Snow Man’. It gathers the situation and simultaneously offers itself as provocation to take responsibility for the poverty involved. I think the mind assumes this responsibility in the only way it can – by letting the imagination turn to generalizations capable of coming to terms with everything at stake in plainness. The final figures give the feeling for what the scene had lacked – not as a fiction but as a bleak assessment that satisfies because it raises the level of transparency that can be taken into intimate being. That may be all that is left viable as a concept of the will, and it may suffice.

Notes 1. This is Husserl’s most succinct definition of the crisis he saw facing the European sciences: The genuine spiritual struggles of European humanity as such take the form of struggles between the philosophies, that is, between the skeptical philosophies – or nonphilosophies, which retain the word but not the task – and the actual and still vital philosophies. But the vitality of the latter consists in the fact that they are struggling for their own true and genuine meaning and thus for the meaning of a genuine humanity. To bring latent reason to the understanding of its own possibilities and thus to bring to insight the possibility of metaphysics as a true possibility – this is the only way to put metaphysics or universal philosophy on the strenuous road to realization. (15) Note that my emphasis on this specific book of Husserl’s gives my chapter a very different slant from the two critics I know who have also written on Husserl and Stevens, Thomas Hines and Paul Kenneth Naylor. 2. Stevens in fact would probably not have seen his projections about the transcendental ego as metaphysical inquiry, nor have quite cast his project as opposing the ontology of objectifying foundational science. When he speaks of metaphysics, he allies himself clearly with pragmatist values: ‘For all the reasons stated by William James, and for many more, and in spite of M. Jacques Maritain, we do not want to be metaphysicians’ (CPP 679). However, this statement needs contextualizing. Stevens agrees with James when their opponent is the same – that is when metaphysics is cast as the effort to establish an order of being that underlies appearance. Yet in other situations he plays a quite different tune. When he is not worrying about discredited models of judgment but seeking to reconcile imagination and fact, he sounds very much like Husserl attempting to establish a non-foundational model of objectivity. (He sounds also like Emerson, but this metaphysical Emerson has not been of much interest

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topragmatists.) In fact, the passage from which I have quoted goes on to make metaphysical claims that ‘the imagination never brings anything into the world but that, on the contrary, like the personality of the poet in the act of creating, it is no more than a process, and desiring with all the power of our desire not to write falsely, do we not begin to think of the possibility that poetry is only reality, after all, and that poetic truth is a factual truth . . . ’ (CPP 680). Consider also this letter of May 1948, written to Thomas McGreevy: ‘The mind with metaphysical affinities has a dash when it deals with reality that the purely realistic mind never has because the purely realistic mind never experiences any passion for reality’ (L 597). And then there are the ways Stevens’ passion for reality is expressed, especially his propensity for copulative verbs and for abstractions involving absolute terms like ‘real’ and ‘unreal’. 3. Clearly, there is significant work on Stevens inspired by these developments within the phenomenological tradition. But all of it that I know has followed what we might call the Heidegger-Derrida axis, because that line of thinking makes it possible to speak of ‘being’ and even of ‘spirit’ without worrying about a transcendental subject. But, in my view, if one ignores the transcendental subject one ignores a plausible ground for Stevens’ idea of imagination and eviscerates the constitutive roles it can play. 4. One painful aspect of spending much of one’s life on a poet’s work is that it becomes impossible to acknowledge the depth and scope of one’s debts to other critics – for their provocations as well as for their insights. Suffice it to say that I have wanted to talk about Stevens as metaphysician and phenomenologist ever since reading J. Hillis Miller’s Poets of Reality in grad school. And for this chapter I found James Longenbach’s Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things most useful for its provocations and Bart Eeckhout’s Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing for its capacious grasp of the scholarly responsibilities one takes on in writing on Stevens. 5. This is an example of the kind of criticism that I think is so bound to its own demands it cannot see the distinctive strengths of poets who manage to be individuals: If Wallace Stevens is a master influence in fifty years, if the best poets of America look to him as an avatar of integrity and achievement, if their subjects are his subjects, their passions and their stances ones by which we recognize him – then the break between poetry and American culture will be complete, poets will have made their final retreat from the world in which ordinary men and women live, and those of us who are devoted to poetry will have become such absurdly specialized and grotesquely sensitive creatures that conferences like this one will have to occur in some huge bubble to keep us all from getting infected by the real world. (Wiman 240) 6. Stevens’ general claim about the imagination is that it is ‘the power of the mind over the possibilities of things’ (CPP 726). But we have to place that general comment in conjunction with the many specific properties Stevens gives to that power. Among those are the capacities to make sense exceed all metaphor (CPP 370), to ally with our sense of nobility as the ‘force’ (and not a substance) that the mind does not add to human nature but employs as a ‘violence within that protects us from a violence without’ (CPP 665), to ‘bring about fluctuations in reality in words free from mysticism’ remaining independent of one’s desires to elevate or idealize


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it (CPP 639–40), and to destroy the false version of itself as ‘some incalculable vates within us’ while functioning like light to add ‘nothing except itself’ and yet utterly transform our sense of the value of what we encounter (CPP 681). 7. For example in my ‘The Pound/Stevens Era’ and my Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry. Here I bring in the idea of the exponential even though I cannot demonstrate it because it is Stevens’ ultimate figure for the intensification of powers in both the projected ego-stance and in what language affords that projective ego:

The major abstraction is the idea of man And major man is its exponent, abler In the abstract than in his singular. (CPP 336)

Major man is our fiction of our own fullest self-satisfactions. And because those satisfactions must include an idea of themselves, major man is abler in the abstract than in his singular. The abstraction necessary for a philosophical poetry exists not in the ideas, but in the scope of the direct thinking by which the exponential stance engages its subject. And because the magnification of intensities depends on simple expoundings, our senses of empowerment come with an inescapable social horizon. We are bound to each other through the qualities of expounding that our language can produce. I describe this state at some length in my The Particulars of Rapture (154–5). And Stevens describes it better in ‘A Collect of Philosophy’ (CPP 864). 8. ‘One confides in what has no / Concealed creator’ (CPP 263). 9. A longer statement of Critchley’s is worth quoting: We see things in their mereness, in their plainness and remoteness from us, and we accept it calmly, without the frustrated assertions and juvenile overreachings of the will. Such calm is not thoughtlessness, but rather thoughtful, insight that comes from having things in sight. At its best poetry offers an experience of the world as meditation, the mind slowing in front of things, the mind pushing back against the pressure of reality through the minimal transfigurations of the imagination. (88) Put crudely, I am suspicious of this account because it does not correlate either with the paucity of things in late Stevens or the marvellous outflow of lyrics (which is hard to explain as all motivated by emerging disbelief in the lyric). 10. These poems are much less about things than about people accommodating themselves to things, as in ‘Lebensweisheitspielerei’: Each person completely touches us With what he is and as he is, In the stale grandeur of annihilation. (CPP 430)

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Works cited Altieri, Charles. Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Altieri, Charles. ‘Practical Sense – Impractical Objects: Why Neo-Pragmatism Cannot Sustain an Aesthetics’. REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Ed. Winfried Fluck et al. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1999. 113–36. Altieri, Charles. ‘The Pound/Stevens Era’. The Wallace Stevens Journal 26.2 (Fall 2002): 228–50. Altieri, Charles. The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Critchley, Simon. Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. London: Routledge, 2005. Derrida, Jacques. De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question. Paris: Galilée, 1987. Eeckhout, Bart. Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Hines, Thomas. The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens: Phenomenological Parallels with Husserl and Heidegger. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1976. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Longenbach, James. Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Miller, J. Hillis. Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Naylor, Paul Kenneth. ‘ “The Idea of It”: Wallace Stevens and Edmund Husserl’. The Wallace Stevens Journal 12.1 (Spring 1988): 44–55. Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. Wiman, Christian. ‘Position Paper: Wallace Stevens’. The Wallace Stevens Journal 28.2 (Fall 2004): 240–1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Trans. Peter Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

5 ‘Without human meaning’: Stevens, Heidegger and the Foreignness of Poetry Krzysztof Ziarek

To remark that Stevens’ poetry develops, throughout his long career, as poetry about poetry – that is, as poetry preoccupied with investigating and expounding the goals and limits of writing poetry – would be to state the obvious. What still merits further attention, however, is the direction in which Stevens’ poems, in their continuous preoccupation with postRomantic poetic paradigms and twentieth-century philosophical notions, point us: namely the idea of taking poetic language toward what Stevens himself calls ‘the end of the mind’ (CPP 476). On the one hand, the notion of the end of the mind is emblematic of the boundary between the subject and the object (or mind and reality) in Stevens; and, as such, concerns the possibility of a ‘beyond’ to the imagination and subjective perception, one which would open poetry to ‘the plain sense of things’ (CPP 428). On the other hand, the end of the mind marks the limit of human meaning and feeling, as Stevens observes. This ending indicates also the moment when poetry puts into question the notion of ‘man’ and its central role in the anthropocentric organization of reality. One might call this the ‘dishumanizing’ moment of poetry, when poetry attempts to take language beyond meaning as such. Accordingly, this chapter develops this latter reading of the ‘end of the mind’ in order to examine the foreignness intimated in poetry: namely that aspect of poetic language which, within the proliferating human meanings and truths, sounds like ‘a foreign song’ (CPP 476). Stevens explores the ‘end of the mind’ as a specific zone of language, or of poetic thinking, where, as he puts it in ‘Of Mere Being’, ‘A gold-feathered bird / Sings in the palm, without human meaning, / Without human feeling, a foreign song’ (CPP 476). The problem of the foreignness of poetry – that is, of poetry’s capacity to take us beyond human meaning – is both a poetic and a philosophical question. For Heidegger, it is, in fact, the philosophical question for our contemporary technological age: for the foreignness of poetry opens up the question of ‘being’, or, to be more precise (and to bring Heidegger and Stevens together), of ‘mere being’. Such ‘mere being’ is that which happens ‘without human meaning’ (CPP 476), to invoke Stevens again; but it is also without machination and power, to recall here the direction which Heidegger’s 79

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thinking begins to take in the late 1930s. If we approach poetry in terms of the question of bringing being to language, poetry indeed appears to be a foreign song in the age of unprecedented technological means of calculation and machination, where power operates on the global scale of economic transactions and digital networks and on the micro-scale of genetic and informational manipulation. Considering Stevens and Heidegger jointly allows us to explore two key, interrelated aspects of what I am calling here the foreignness of poetry.1 First, the notion that the sense of ‘mere being’ remains not only without human meaning but without meaning as such. Within this perspective, the task of poetry for both Stevens and Heidegger is to open language to this foreign, non-human sense of being. What this endeavour involves – and this is the second issue I will discuss – is a radical critique and, in fact, a transformation of the notion of ‘man’. This transformation is traced in Heidegger’s rethinking of ‘man’ as Dasein, which constitutes an attempt at a disanthropization of thinking, language and history (undertaken by Heidegger with a particular poignancy already in the late 1930s, but which has become better known through his 1946 essay, ‘Letter on Humanism’). For Heidegger, this entails giving priority to the event of being, the Ereignis, where temporality and history become of foremost importance. To underscore the radicality with which the spatiotemporal play of being opens ‘what is’ onto the future, Heidegger employs the term die Nichtung, literally, the ‘nothinging’; or, as it has been translated into English, ‘nihilation’. As he writes in ‘Letter on Humanism’: ‘The nihilating in Being is the essence of what I call the nothing’ (BWrit 261). Here Heidegger and Stevens meet again, for nothingness is an important recurring motif in Stevens’ poetry: from ‘The Snow Man’ to ‘the giant of nothingness’ in ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’, to a knowledge of nothingness in ‘A Clear Day and No Memories’ (CPP 8, 380, 475).2 Thus the two critical, often indistinguishable, aspects of the ‘dishumanization’ that Stevens and Heidegger trace in different ways in their work are the openness to what they both refer to as the ‘nothingness’ in being and the concomitant openness of poetic language to a sense of mere being without (human) meaning. While Stevens appears more tentative in his exploration of this foreignness at the end of the mind, only sometimes indicating the stakes and implications involved in it, Heidegger makes clear that at issue is the critique of both the technicity pervading contemporary society and the rapidly increasing manipulative power characteristic of modernity.

I

The language of mere being

It has always struck me as appropriate that Stevens’ posthumous collection The Palm at the End of the Mind should end with ‘Of Mere Being’ and that the volume’s title should come from the opening line of this poem. Because of

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this arrangement, it is as if the poem framed Stevens’ entire output, hinting at the extent to which his poems are concerned with the poetic ability of language to write ‘of mere being’. I do not mean to suggest that this is Stevens’ only concern, since his poetry is extraordinarily rich and complex, embracing everything from ordinary scenes and familiar objects to complicated philosophical problematics. Nonetheless, it is important to note that, whatever his ‘thematic’ considerations, Stevens keeps trying to evolve a poetic language capable of registering the simple yet elusive event of how what a given poem treats, comes to pass. One can say, then, that Stevens’ poems, through their multiple registers – whether directly in images or through quasi-philosophical deliberations – endeavour to understand and to say how things ‘are’. What demarcates Stevens’ approach is that he does not see beings as objects to be known, represented or described poetically; but instead accentuates their elusive manner of being. And it is this evanescent event, this ‘separate sense’ (as Stevens calls it in ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’; CPP 378) which his language attempts to bring into focus. A pronounced difficulty inherent in this project has to do with the fact that the ‘separate sense’ of ‘mere being’ does not follow the logic of presence; and, as such, does not submit to the rules of representation and meaning. In the words of ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’, ‘It is and it / Is not and, therefore, is’ (CPP 378). ‘Mere being’, the simple and ordinary occurrence of something that exists, is neither present nor absent, as it evades the metaphysical economy of binary opposites which structures language and representation. Because of this ‘separate sense’, a sense apart from meaning and representation, ‘mere being’ both becomes emblematic of the problem of language in Stevens and demarcates the proper terrain of the poetic in language. To put it differently, at issue is how ‘mere being’ interfaces with language, yet does so without entering directly into words; a phenomenon which makes ‘mere being’ irreducible to signification, expression or representation. Implicitly addressing this very question in his essay ‘Language’, Heidegger takes issue with what he sees as three dominant characterizations of language, namely: (1) that language is expression, (2) that it is simply a human activity, and (3) that ‘human expression is always a presentation and representation of the real and the unreal’ (PLT 190). Heidegger grants that even though these three statements about language are quite correct, they fail to capture what in truth happens in language and as language. In order to change decisively this view of language oriented toward representation, expression and communication, Heidegger famously proposes that it is language itself that speaks first. He thus draws attention to how – beyond representation and expression, beyond the communication of feelings or ideas – something else ‘speaks’ in language. That ‘something’ is obviously not a thing, an entity or an object, but the very notion of ‘being’, or, to echo Stevens, ‘mere being’. In his 1941 lecture course entitled Basic Concepts, Heidegger remarks that it is only beings that come to be said in words, and not ‘being’ itself. Yet

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even though words name only what is (that is, beings), they also keep saying ‘being’ without bringing it directly into words. ‘To say of being that it, being, is . . . unintentionally converts being into a being. Saying thus speaks as if it knew nothing of being. Being is cast away in saying, by saying, through the word about being, through every word about being. This casting away of being, however, can never relinquish being’ (Grundbegriffe 88; BCon 74–5). ‘Being’ holds silent in language, but this holding silent is precisely what makes words (and thus meaning), representation and expression possible. If ‘being’ could be put into words and its meaning expressed, it would have to be said each time in a singular manner. Language, however, works, as Heidegger suggests, in such a way that, without saying ‘being’ in words, it says ‘being’ along with them. Most important, this ‘along with words’ does not add itself to what is said in words (namely beings), but is instead given before beings, as the opening for them and, at the same time, for their names. As Heidegger explains: ‘Speaking says being “along with”, not as an addition and a supplement that could just as well be left out, but as the pre-giving of what always first permits the naming of beings’ (BCon 63, 53). In short, what is said with the words (which inevitably silence ‘being’) is the event of making room for words and the naming of beings. To the extent to which ‘being’ comes to be said along with words – namely, as the silencing which accompanies words and allows them to arise – ‘being’ incessantly undoes the very limits which meaning and representation place on words and signification. Refusing limits to beings, ‘being’ saves ‘presencing’ from becoming reduced to standing presence, or constancy. Heidegger repeatedly underscores the fact that this disallowing of boundaries (in relation to other beings and in time, that is, as closed in the ‘now’ of the present) is not only nothing negative but, on the contrary, indicates the space of freedom: it frees beings to be what they are, as ‘happening’, occurring beings, which never exist as simple presences but keep unfolding into the future. In short, the concepts of constancy and standing presence are not fitting for beings, for they conceal the temporal manner in which such beings exist. I can only indicate here how this understanding of the conundrum of ‘being’ in relation to language works in Stevens through a brief discussion of ‘Of Mere Being’. Let’s start by noting that the title phrase never occurs in the poem itself, as though it were intended to be articulated aside from the words of the poem. The poem is a single image, of the palm at the end of the mind with a bird in it, singing a foreign, non-human song. While humanity is implied in the words ‘mind’, ‘thought’ and ‘reason’, the two instances in which the word ‘human’ actually appears underscore the non-human ‘sense’ of the situation: ‘without human meaning’ and ‘without human feeling’ (CPP 476–7). The poem, which obviously operates in terms of meaning, attempts at the same time to undo this very meaning by accenting the non-human element and its foreign sense. The poem ends with four lines which simply enumerate elements of the image: the bird, its feathers, the palm, the wind


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moving the branches and the bird’s feathers dangling down. This simple enumeration constitutes an attempt to articulate ‘without human meaning’ (an impossible attempt, for any word bears unmistakably traces of meaning). Yet, as the title suggests, what the poem tries to say, ‘mere being’, does not come in words directly: it is not part of the poem’s ‘human’ meaning. Rather, it is supposed to come ‘along with’ the words, as though aside from their meaning. This is perhaps why the poem simply lists aspects of the image of the bird singing in the ‘palm at the end of the mind’, which is also the edge of space, since space itself is still part of human meaning. The scene indicated by the words in the poem – and these words are so few and elementary that it seems an exaggeration to suggest that they ‘describe’ the scene – is taking place beyond the last thought, in a region which does not belong to thought and is not given meaning by it. However, the only way Stevens can indicate this region at the end of the mind is by saying indirectly what it is not. For if this ‘beyond’ were to be said directly, it would be given inappropriate and unfitting boundaries of human meaning; and would thus be unable to carry a sense separate from meaning and representation. Saying what human reason and thought ‘mean’, the poem also says ‘with’ the very words it deploys – though not in them or in their meaning – what defies the boundaries of thought and meaning: the foreign song of the bird. It is precisely this foreignness of the song, its separate sense or non-human meaning, that, as the poem indicates, makes us happy or unhappy, setting the poem’s mood. The mood of the situation, which is what the poem tries to say ‘along with’ its words, resides not in (human) meaning or representation but specifically in the manner in which language can become capable of saying non-human sense, without simply making it present and giving it meaning. This non-human sense is, obviously, the ‘mere being’ of the title, mere being which also comes to mark the poem’s mood. Set in this mood without human meaning, the poem enacts the link between ‘mere being’ and words, so that being can be said ‘along with’ words but, at the same time, only as concealed from the words’ meaning. The foreignness of the bird’s song, without human meaning or feeling, is clearly named as such in words: it is captured in them and ‘is’ there in the poem as part of an always human meaning. Yet, to refer again to the second section of ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’, it also is not there, since the meaning given to the bird’s song by the poem’s words conceals the foreignness of the singing and the strangeness of its non-meaning. When something – an entity, occurrence or experience – is said in words, what comes to be said is, in fact, inevitably only a being. To this extent, while ‘being’ indeed gets marked in the saying of entities, it does so only as concealed, as ‘not there’ in the words themselves. Naming beings or entities is a way of saying that ‘being’ is there, in the names of beings; and yet that it is also not there, specifically because ‘being’ disallows boundaries to entities, making it impossible for their ‘being’ to be closed or fixed, or, finally, named. As a result, ‘being’ both is and is not there in words; and, therefore, as ‘A

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Primitive Like an Orb’ states, is – because ‘being’ comes to be said in language only in a sense separate from presence and absence (it is neither present nor absent in language). Language in Stevens is thus always a conundrum of saying. It unceasingly produces names, elaborate semantic plays, intricate syntactical and verse patterns, and often an overwhelming richness of meaning. And yet, perhaps all that is done so as to allow language to ‘flow . . . over us without meanings’ to use a pivotal line from ‘A Clear Day and No Memories’. And it can flow over us without meanings because ‘This invisible activity, this sense’ (CPP 475) of ‘mere being’ is allowed to remain a foreign song.

II A foreign song without meaning, or the sense of mere being What exactly is foreign about the song that, as Stevens indicates, can be encountered at ‘the end of the mind’ (CPP 476)? The foreignness comes from the fact that this song does not have meaning: not simply human meaning or feeling, as ‘Of Mere Being’ puts it, but meaning as such. Yet this does not imply that the song – that is, the non-human sense traced in language – is meaningless. As Stevens repeatedly makes clear, it has a sense, but a sense that is neither translatable into meaning nor reducible to the order of signification. ‘The Plain Sense of Things’ calls it just that – a plain sense: ‘After the leaves have fallen, we return / To a plain sense of things. It is as if / We had come to an end of the imagination, / Inanimate in an inert savoir’ (CPP 428). ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’ refers to it as ‘a separate sense’ (CPP 378), and ‘The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract’ talks about ‘enormous sense’: ‘It would be enough / If we were ever, just once, at the middle, fixed / In This Beautiful World Of Ours and not as now, // Helplessly at the edge, enough to be / Complete, because at the middle, if only in sense, / And in that enormous sense, merely enjoy’ (CPP 370). Being in the middle of our mind, so to speak, we remain merely and helplessly at the edge of the world. But if language were taken to the end of the mind, we could find ourselves at the middle of the world. The middle is understood here by Stevens in a very specific way: it refers to remaining ‘only in sense’ as opposed to having, producing or understanding meaning. In other words, to be at the end of the mind is to remain only in sense, without either being able to or having to translate this sense into meaning for purposes of signification or understanding. Stevens implies here that the sense at stake in poetry remains foreign to meaning; that is, it is a particular sense that is not to be signified or understood, properly speaking. Nonetheless, this sense needs to be ‘poetized’, brought into poetry and language; but in a way that would neither submit it to meaning nor render it into signification. The translation of this sense into meaning is not only impossible but also inappropriate. This is the case because the sense Stevens mentions in ‘The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract’ is an enormous sense, whose magnitude is not


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simply a matter of dimension – though it is the sense of ‘being-in-the-world’ with all its horizontal and vertical intricacies – but also of order or category. To put it simply, the sense at stake in poetry is not of the order of meaning. It is something to be ‘merely’ enjoyed, brought into words without being given the form of signification or the valence of meaning. We have to be clear here: this sense is not meaningless, nor is it non-sense. The categories of absence or negation fail to capture this sense, which remains beyond the binary of meaningfulness and meaninglessness, sense and non-sense. To suggest in the words of ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’ that this sense is separate amounts to saying that it occurs beyond the oppositions of sense and nonsense, presence and absence. It both ‘is’ and ‘is not’, as Stevens puts it, and therefore ‘is’. But this latter ‘is’ has the valence of being beyond presence and absence; that is, of being equivalent neither to ‘is’ nor to its negation, ‘is not’. This Stevensian sense of ‘mere being’ is reminiscent of the event in Heidegger’s thought, which, though occurring strictly speaking beyond or apart from presence and absence, makes room for both. In ‘The Course of a Particular’, Stevens describes such an event as ‘the life of that which gives life as it is’ (CPP 460). And what gives life as it is, is ‘being’: whose ‘life’, in turn, is nothing other than temporality. Like Heidegger, Stevens repeatedly draws out the relation between being and temporality in his work, though sometimes employing a different terminology to depict the ‘sense’ of the happening beyond presence and absence associated with the event. For the most part, Stevens writes about this ‘separate sense’ of the event in terms of life and change. In the short opening preface to ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, Stevens uses the phrase ‘living changingness’ (CPP 329) to underscore the temporality of ‘being’, whose elusive, separate sense his poetry continuously tries to imprint upon its language. A later poem, ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’, ends with the image of ‘the giant of nothingness . . . ever changing, living in change’ (CPP 380). The sense of ‘mere being’ – of its temporality and characteristic changingness – is a sense that remains separate from meaning, signification, understanding and representation. ‘A Clear Day and No Memories’ refers to it as ‘this invisible activity, this sense’ (CPP 475) which implies that the sense of ‘being’ Stevens wants to manifest in his poetry is the invisible activity of time, the sense of temporality separate from senses and meanings which time itself unfolds. Temporality, or changingness (as Stevens calls it), constitutes ‘an inherent order active to be / Itself’ (CPP 379). In other words, temporality does not mean anything, as it does not pertain to the order of meaning; it is just active to be itself: namely to unfold time and to unfold as time. This sense of ‘mere being’ is often invoked by Stevens as a special weather, an image that returns in his key poems: from the winter weather in ‘The Snow Man’ and ‘The Course of a Particular’, believing in the weather in ‘Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas’, to the weather of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, ‘The Plain Sense of Things’ and ‘A Clear Day

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and No Memories’. The ‘separate sense’ of ‘mere being’ is not, as Stevens repeatedly reminds us, easy to come upon, for it is continuously dissimulated and rendered elusive by language and the imagination. As he puts it in ‘The Plain Sense of Things’, ‘The great pond, / The plain sense of it, without reflections . . . all this / Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, / Required, as a necessity requires’ (CPP 428). Language and the poetic imagination remain a necessity for poetry, which would simply not exist without them. The necessity of poetic ‘imagining’ constitutes the inevitable knowledge: on the basis of which the thinking of the sense of ‘mere being’ becomes possible at all. In Things Merely Are, Simon Critchley presents a persuasive case for understanding Stevens’ meditation on this ‘inevitable knowledge’ discovered by the poetic imagination in terms of a critical shift from the central concern with the relation between reality and mind to a quasi-phenomenological preoccupation with the thing itself in Stevens’ late poetry. Underscoring the way in which Stevens’ late poetry attempts to present poetically the fact that ‘things merely are’, Critchley concludes with the observation that ‘[t]he feeling that we feel for a real given to us through poetic experience is, I think, calm. We see things in their mereness, in their plainness and remoteness from us . . . At its best, poetry offers an experience of the world as meditation, the mind slowing in front of things, the mind pushing back against the pressure of reality through the minimal transfigurations of the imagination’ (88). It is these minimal transfigurations of the imagination that interest me here, especially the way that these transformations affect our understanding of language and, alongside it, of the human and its place in the world. Discussing the concluding stanza of ‘As You Leave the Room’, Critchley suggests that Stevens in his late poetry tends to undo the very workings of poetic language, signalling a certain poetic powerlessness with regard to reality: ‘Desire is here less than the poem and the poem itself is nothing because it only effects a change in what is unreal and is hence no change at all. Poetry is powerless. It is powerlessness itself. A powerlessness which can at best dimly echo the passivity of things as they are given’ (81). And yet another, slightly transposed reading of the concluding stanza seems to be possible, perhaps even desirable, in the context of Stevens’ late poems: And yet nothing has been changed except what is Unreal, as if nothing had been changed at all. (CPP 598) All pivots here on how one reads what, in the poem, is ‘Unreal’. To me, ‘Unreal’ appears to refer to the workings of poetic language; and, more precisely, to the transformation effected by these workings in the attitude of


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the poet. This attitude, both brought about by and at the same time shaping the language, is the changed ‘Unreal’, since ‘in reality’ nothing has changed, to the extent that one is tempted to take reality, the ‘Real’, to be something apparently other from and beyond the mind. In this sense, it seems ‘as if nothing had been changed at all’ and yet this is not quite true, as the ‘as if’ signals, because in Stevens language and being are never separate but emerge as already conjoined, one brought into the open and formed by the other in an ever-changing, poietic movement of language. This movement is poietic in the specific sense of bringing forth what is, because language does not signify what is already there – ready to be (re)presented – but rather brings forth reality as always already poietically conjoined with language. Thus, even though it seems as if nothing had been changed at all in reality, the change in the ‘Unreal’ effects a change in language and poetic attitude; which, to the extent that reality is joined with poetic language in being brought forth by and into language as reality, has already effected a transformation in reality. A change, as if unreal, in language, becomes a change in the poet’s relation to reality; and thus a change in the way in which reality discloses poietically as real in its emergence into language. I hesitate to call this poietic movement of bringing forth the ‘powerlessness’ of poetry, because, however minimal, as if nothing had changed, this transfiguration marks precisely the force of poetic language. This force is indeed not power, as its purview is not power over reality but a force of bringing into the open which discloses the time-space of what then presents itself as ‘reality’. The poietic force of language is power-less in a specific sense, reminiscent of the way in which Heidegger tries to think ‘being’ as ‘power-free’ (macht-los): it is not powerless as in being without or devoid of power but rather ‘power-free’, released or disengaged from the operations of power.3 If the mind and the imagination are instances of human power – exercised through language, representation and knowledge over reality – then we can see Stevens’ late poetry as attempting to find a modality of language in which the minimal transfigurations performed by the imagination are precisely the moments when language becomes released from its own representational power, and thus from its proclivity to take possession through knowledge. I would agree with Critchley that Stevens is looking for a cure from the ‘desire for poetry’ (83) but only insofar as the desire here is for a poetry of what one might call ‘strong’ imagination, where the mind and language assert their power over reality, creatively shaping and articulating it into ‘human meaning’. In a way, Stevens tries to cure poetry of its prevalent, non-poietic power – of the mind, the imagination and language – and to release its poietic force from the overwhelming assertiveness of poetic meaning. The reality of ‘mere being’ is indeed without human purpose and human meaning; and it becomes disclosed as such through a poietic letting-be, a release from power performed by language. For what Critchley calls the ‘simple “there is” of things’ (75) is not there of its own, as it were, prior

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to the entrance of the imagination: it is in fact the very ‘minimal’ transformation of the imagination that brings forth the ‘there is’ of things. In other words, this ‘there is’ is not just ‘there’; but it has to be allowed to disclose itself as a ‘there is’. And what is necessary for this letting be of the ‘there is’ is the release of language from its power to represent and to know, which enacts also a release of reality from power through the power-free, poietic force of language. The ‘palm at the end of the mind’ – although beyond the last thought, beyond the reach of representation and knowledge, and thus without human meaning and human feeling – is still ‘at the end of the mind’ (CPP 476). It is ‘of’ the mind, as reality has been brought forth always and already as joined to and enjoined by language. But such reality is joined to language not through representational power, enforcing human meaning but through the power-free poietic disclosure. And as Stevens puts it in ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’: To discover winter and know it well, to find, Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all, Out of nothing to have come on major weather, It is possible, possible, possible. It must Be possible. (CPP 349) It would take too long here to flesh out an interpretation of these lines in the context of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, but let me just make two points critical to my argument here. First, the ‘possible’ that Stevens underscores here three times is not simply a possibility to be actualized some day in the future. Rather, it seems to indicate the workings of temporality itself as the dimension of the possible: that is, as the ceaseless unfolding of future possibilities. The major weather upon which the poem comes is not a moment in time but the ‘weather of the possible’, so to speak, which is the sense of being as the futural unfolding of what becomes possible and what comes to exist in terms of possibilities. Second, one comes upon such major weather ‘out of nothing’, which means without reasoning or imposing ideas and representations; but which also suggests that the major weather Stevens describes pivots on the notion of nothingness.

III

A native to nothingness

While Stevens’ poetry signals on many occasions the desire to extinguish the desire for power that permeates both language and reality, it is only in his late poems that Stevens arrives at a poetic idiom capable of instantiating a power-free poietic language, so that the palm would remain ‘at the end’ of the mind – and not outside or prior to it – and yet rise there without human


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feeling or meaning, ‘out of nothing’. As ‘A Clear Day and No Memories’ concludes: Today the air is clear of everything. It has no 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. (CPP 475) The adjective ‘shallow’ is not negative here, but indicates the fact that there are no deep or hidden meanings in the spectacle or in the knowledge of nothingness, which flows without meanings. This is the case because the sense of ‘mere being’ lies in its invisible activity, in the temporalization and the nothingness (or nihilation) characteristic of ‘being’, which, although untranslatable into and irreducible to meaning, affords us a certain clarity, as the title ‘A Clear Day and No Memories’ intimates. This clarity has to do with a particular mode of ‘being in the world’, one that Stevens describes in terms of being native. But the nativeness at issue here is not being native simply to the world but, rather, to the world’s temporal happening: that is, being native to the nothingness (or the nihilation) which ceaselessly unfolds reality into its futural possibilities. To really flesh out this argument, one would have to examine carefully the frequent occurrences and the significance of a cluster of related terms in Stevens’ work: native, indigenous, primitive, savage. As a brief illustration of what is at stake in the recurrence of these terms in Stevens, let me point here to section XXVIII of ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’: ‘I am a native in this world / And think in it as a native thinks, / Gesu, not native of a mind . . . a native in the world / And like a native think in it. . . . Here I inhale profounder strength / And as I am, I speak and move // And things are as I think they are / And say they are on the blue guitar’ (CPP 147–8). The nativeness that concerns Stevens here is not an inhabiting in the human mind but, instead, a nativeness to the world. It becomes equivalent to a native thinking: that is, a thinking like a native in the world, a thinking that allows things both to be and to be said as they are. This section of ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ is echoed in ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’, which, referring to being as ‘an inherent order active to be itself’ describes it as ‘a nature to its natives all / Beneficence, a repose, utmost repose, / The muscles of a magnet aptly felt, / A giant, on the horizon, glistening’ (CPP 379). The giant glistening on the horizon, as the last section manifests, is the nothingness that keeps unfolding ‘being’ in its futural direction. Stevens thus seeks a mode of thinking that would be native to the world in the specific sense of being native to the nothingness

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characteristic of the ‘mere’ happening of ‘being’. This giant of nothingness with which ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’ closes, indicates the ‘primitive’ mode of being (but primitive in the sense of the specific way of dwelling, attuned to the nihilating momentum of the play of time and space). Such nativeness implies the capacity to remain indigenous to the nothingness constitutive of the sense of ‘being’: namely the capacity to dwell in the invisible activity of the futural unfolding of time. It is easy to trace a parallel between Stevens’ idea of native thinking and Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, where Dasein is understood as a ‘posthuman’ mode of thinking and dwelling in the world, which is no longer confined to or determined by the idea of ‘man’. The notion of Dasein becomes tied closely to the demand of ‘dishumanizing’ (Entmenschung),4 that is, to the attempt to refashion ‘man’ and thought in a non-anthropic manner, which remains perhaps the least thought of aspect of Heidegger’s work.5 Since it sounds strange and foreign within Western thought, this demand to displace ‘man’ has unfortunately prompted many misinterpretations of Heidegger’s remarks as anti-humanist. Yet this call to ‘dishuman’ thinking very explicitly avoids the connotations – very much mistaken in this context – of dehumanization or degradation. In fact, as Heidegger repeatedly remarks, it makes possible thinking the mode of ‘being’ proper to humans: that is, Da-sein, which finally gives their due to the temporality, historicity and finitude constitutive of ‘existence’. The main cause of the frequent misunderstanding of the ‘dis-humanizing’ momentum of Heidegger’s thought as a form of anti-humanism is the still predominantly negative, metaphysical conception of nihilation (Nichtung), so crucial to Heidegger’s work. Within metaphysics, nihilation comes to be construed as negation or as ‘nothing’ and as such becomes misread as nihilism. By contrast, Heidegger sees nihilation as prior to the binary of negativity and positivity, as the force that opens up the very space in which positing and negation both become possible. However, even though negativity arises from nihilation, it tends to obliterate the originary, enabling character of nihilation: ‘Every “no” that does not mistake itself as willful assertion of the positing power of subjectivity, but rather remains a lettingbe of ek-sistence, answers to the claim of nihilation illumined’ (BWrit 260). For Heidegger nihilation is the enabling force of letting-be, which makes it possible for beings to be what they are, and frees them from the ways in which power articulates the spatio-temporal play of experience into entities, objects or facts. Nihilation is neither the power of negation nor the powerlessness of inactivity, but instead the power-free unfolding of ‘being’. It seems to me that Stevens’ notion of being native to nothingness takes his poetry in a very similar direction. This ‘nativeness to nothingness’ marks the foreignness intrinsic to the human mind, the edge or the end of the mind, where one comes upon a different weather, as it were, a foreign clarity in which, nonetheless, one discovers oneself


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to be native, as Stevens’ poems suggest on numerous occasions. In this clarity afforded by the nihilation/nothingness intrinsic to ‘being’, ‘It was everything being more real’ (CPP 187) as ‘The Latest Freed Man’ puts it, everything being seiender, more in ‘being’, to recall Heidegger. The freedom mentioned in the title refers to being freed from the idea of ‘man’: that is, freed to be ‘native to nothingness’. While Stevens does not flesh out the stakes and ramifications of being ‘native to nothingness’ – although his ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ might be a starting-point – Heidegger’s work makes evident that at issue is freedom from power and machination. Here I only have space to hint, by way of a conclusion, at these stakes. In ‘Letter on Humanism’, Heidegger argues that ‘being-there’ is more ‘properly’ human than any humanism. This means that Dasein defines ‘being-in-the-world’ more fittingly than any humanist conception – whether one thinks here of Renaissance and modern humanism, existentialism or Marxism – because humanism, by its very definition and metaphysical assumptions, remains of necessity both a value-oriented and an anthropocentric approach. Yet this radically nihilating dimension of the ‘human’– its Da-sein – becomes concealed by the technicist momentum of relations in modernity. What this means in specific terms is that human ‘being’ becomes defined and explained through technicist notions, namely in terms of making, fabrication and power. The ‘threat’ involved in the Technik – that is, in the essence of technology – is linked to the understanding of ‘being’ in modernity in terms of Machenschaft, which is essentially a matter of machination and manipulative power (no matter whether that power happens to be creative or repressive). In its specific Heideggerian sense, technicity describes the manner in which modern relations become disposed in terms of power: as its either positive (creative) or negative (dominating) manifestations. As a consequence, what cannot and does not appear within this manifestation of being as power, is the power-free: the enabling force of nihilation. Unable to see nihilation as doing anything, technicity thus disguises and disfigures this enabling force of nihilation into negation, absence of force or inactivity. Consequently, the prevalent modes of technicity and ‘technical’ thinking either misrecognize nihilation as a nothing or a lack, or, even more readily, dismiss its power-free momentum as a form of inaction and indifference. In these specific ways, technicity increasingly ‘threatens’ to conceal Da-sein’s capacity and responsibility for keeping the power-free momentum of nihilation and fostering its enabling force. A separate occasion would be needed to show that this is indeed the direction in which Heidegger tries to think Dichtung (poetry) – or more accurately, the poietic dimension of art and also of being. The importance of poetry for Heidegger lies in the way in which it reclaims for language and thinking their element, namely nihilation, since, as he remarks in ‘Letter on Humanism’,

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‘language under the dominance of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity almost irremediably falls out of its element’ (BWrit 222–3). Similarly, Stevens’ poems link the idea of poetic writing with being ‘native to nothingness’, which becomes equivalent to being without meaning, and thus to transforming the sense of being human beyond its entrenched anthropic conception. All these intricately related issues become manifest in the closing lines of ‘Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit’: It is the human that is the alien, The human that has no cousin in the moon. It is the human that demands his speech From beasts or from the incommunicable mass. If there must be a god in the house, let him be one That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness, A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass Of which we are too distantly a part. (CPP 288) Are we too part of this vermilioned nothingness, even if only distantly? Or are we ‘humans’ too distantly a part of nothingness, ‘of mere being’, to become native to it and let it be without meaning? This double valence of ‘we are too distantly a part’ opens the question on which, at least for Stevens and Heidegger, the enabling foreignness of poetry pivots.

Notes 1. There has been considerable scholarship devoted to the intersections between Stevens and Heidegger. Most notable past critical elaborations include Thomas J. Hines, The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens: Phenomenological Parallels with Husserl and Heidegger, Paul Bové, Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry and Frank Kermode, ‘Dwelling Poetically in Connecticut’. Among the more recent ones, Simon Critchley’s Things Merely Are is of particular importance to my approach (as I discuss later in this chapter). I explored some of the earlier scholarship on Stevens and philosophy in Inflected Language: Towards a Hermeneutics of Nearness. 2. For a discussion of nothingness in Stevens, as well as parallels between Stevens and Heidegger on dwelling, see Robert Pack, ‘Place and Nothingness in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens’. 3. In Besinnung Heidegger remarks that ‘being’ unfolds beyond power and powerlessness (ausserhalb Macht und Ohnmacht) (see Besinnung 84; Mindfulness 69). This is why Heidegger refers to ‘being’ as das Machtlose, literally ‘the powerless’, where the suffix los (‘less’) indicates, however, not absence or lack of power (that is, powerlessness) but the movement of releasing and freeing from power: power-lessness in the


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sense of freedom from power. At least on one occasion, Heidegger equates machtlos with machtfrei, thus suggesting the manner in which the suffix los should be read in relation to power (Macht) as a foregoing of and freedom from the operations of power. For a more sustained discussion of this problematic of the power-free in Heidegger, see my essay ‘Art, Power, and Politics: Heidegger on Machenschaft and Poiesis’. 4. Heidegger introduces the term Entmenschung as a response to what he describes as the prevalent Vermenschung (humanization or anthropization) of all beings. In this context, it is, therefore, preferable to render Entmenschung as disanthropization or dishumanization, rather than as ‘non-humanization’, as the English translation has it (Beiträge zur Phil. 510; Contr. to Phil. 359). 5. One of the exceptions is Derrida’s careful reading in ‘The Ends of Man’ which explores the double vector of Heidegger’s reconceptualization of ‘man’ and ‘humanity’ in terms of Dasein, or ‘being-there’. This double vector comes from the fact that ‘being-there’ refers both to Dasein understood as the mode of being ‘proper’ to humans, and to the ‘there’ of being: that is, the Da where being (Sein) discloses itself. This double reference of the Da leads Derrida to explain that Dasein, ‘though not man, is nevertheless nothing other than man’ and, a little later: ‘It remains that the thinking of Being, the thinking of the truth of Being, in the name of which Heidegger de-limits humanism and metaphysics, remains as thinking of man’ (127, 128). This observation describes very well the manner in which Dasein functions within what Heidegger calls the ‘first beginning’ of thought, that is, within metaphysics. Yet I would argue that it is necessary to consider here Heidegger’s attempt to ‘turn’ from the first to the other beginning, and, the impact of the radical nihilation opened up by this turn. From the perspective of the ‘other beginning’, the thinking of ‘being’ no longer originates in the differential play of the ontico-ontological difference, but from the event (Ereignis) and, as such, it is no longer an anthropic affair. This thinking cannot of course happen without the human participation in the Da of Da-sein; yet it happens only in the ‘middle’ voice, when the Da marks the site of the event and its relation to ‘being’. To this extent, the Da is, therefore, no longer of ‘man’, but is instead granted to human thinking. It is this force of granting that interests Heidegger above and beyond the human participation in the Da. If within the ‘destruction’ of metaphysics, Dasein must be seen as ‘nothing other than man’, within the other beginning it is indeed precisely ‘other’ than ‘man’, as it inscribes the power-free vector of the event. This ‘transformation’ (Verwandlung) of ‘man’ into Da-sein, as Heidegger discusses it in Beiträge zur Philosophie, becomes tantamount to a dishumanization or disanthropization (Entmenschung) (see Beiträge 510).

Works cited Bové, Paul. Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Critchley, Simon. Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. London: Routledge, 2005. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Collins, 1971. (Abbreviated as PLT.)

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Heidegger, Martin. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Gesamtausgabe, vol. 65. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989. (Abbreviated as Beiträge zur Phil.) Heidegger, Martin. Grundbegriffe. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 51. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, [1981] 1991. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Concepts. Trans. Gary E. Aylesworth. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993. (Abbreviated as BCon.) Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Intro. and Trans. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper Collins, [1979] 1993. (Abbreviated as BWrit.) Heidegger, Martin. Besinnung. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 66. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997. Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999. (Abbreviated as Contr. to Phil.) Heidegger, Martin. Mindfulness. Trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary. London: Continuum, 2006. Hines, Thomas J. The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens: Phenomenological Parallels with Husserl and Heidegger. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1976. Kermode, Frank. ‘Dwelling Poetically in Connecticut’. Wallace Stevens: A Celebration. Ed. Frank Doggett and Robert Buttel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). 256–73. Pack, Robert. ‘Place and Nothingness in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens’. The Wallace Stevens Journal 27.1 (2003): 97–115. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. Stevens, Wallace. The Palm at the End of the Mind. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Vintage, 1990. Ziarek, Krzysztof. ‘Art, Power, and Politics: Heidegger on Machenschaft and Poiesis’. Contretemps 3 ( July 2002) (http://www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/3July2002/ziarek.pdf). Ziarek, Krzysztof. Inflected Language: Towards a Hermeneutics of Nearness. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994.

6 Early Christianity in Late Stevens Justin Quinn

I ‘Jerome / Begat the tubas and the fire-wind strings’ (CPP 344): I have always thought this line from ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ was an excellent example of how merciless Wallace Stevens could be to his readers. Was Jerome, perhaps, someone he knew in Hartford, like Naaman of ‘Certain Phenomena of Sound’, who had wandered into Stevens’ great Modernist meditation through pure serendipity? A few lines further down there is mention of a ‘bleakest ancestor’: perhaps Jerome is related to old John Zeller, someone from Stevens’ family in Pennsylvania? Neither of these possibilities turns out to be true. The explanation is even more obscure. The line refers to St Jerome, the Church Father born in 347 1 CE and died in 419 or 420 CE. He translated the Bible into the Vulgate Latin, first from the Greek Septuagint and then directly from Hebrew, and when rendering the Revelation to John, he was unsure exactly how the seven angels announced the end of the world: did they sing, or did they blow on some instrument? If the latter, then which instrument? He plumped for the Latin ‘tuba’, which covers a wide range of horn-instruments in Hebrew (‘et vidi septem angelos stantes in conspectu Dei et datae sunt illis septem tubae’ [Biblia 1889; Rv viii.6]). This was subsequently rendered into English as ‘trumpet’; into German as ‘Posaune’, ‘trombone’ (see Kirkendale 669). Some modern translations say the angels just ‘sounded’ the end, without instruments. Now that is an example of Stevens at his most indefensibly esoteric. Yet persisting, we see that the image is part of a larger network of references to Christianity in Stevens’ later work. Gone is the attitude to be found in Harmonium, which ranges narrowly from dismissive to supercilious, and there is now a much more historicized sense of Christianity.2 Such a revision of Christian history necessarily involved more general questions of the transference of Christian faith to the United States. My aim in tracing these references is not to change received ideas of Stevens as a post-Christian poet 95

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(let alone add ballast to the dubious tale of his deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism). Rather, the references to early Christianity allow Stevens at once to admit the profound shaping force of Christianity on Western culture, including on that of the United States, while also sharpening his perception of his own moment as post-Christian. By ‘moment’ I mean not only the particular stretch of the twentieth century during which Stevens wrote his mature work, but also his physical world, his perception of the climate, vegetation, people and buildings that surrounded him. He lived in a civilization where the centre could not hold, as Yeats had it in ‘The Second Coming’. The poet must then consider what is the work of culture where such totalities have broken down. Stevens was a poet who could not look out his window without thinking about how the view was shaped by our religion and general culture. The window view and Weltanschauung were inextricable to him. In ‘Memorandum’ he refers to the katydids in Ephrata, near Reading. Why would the katydids there be any different from the katydids elsewhere? Stevens was fond of using place-names from the vicinity of Reading in his later work, some with familial connotations. Ephrata is different because it was the home of a fervent religious community in the eighteenth century, and the cloister buildings remain the central tourist attraction of the town to this day (you can stay at the Cloister Motel and have your car serviced at Cloister Car Wash and Lube). Katydids possibly were viewed differently in such a place, because Conrad Beissel’s community meditated so intensely there for three generations. Jorie Graham has insightfully remarked that Stevens is ‘a poet so fully in the body, in his senses, and moving towards the conceptual and philosophical in order to complete himself’ (Graham 90). Because the ‘physical fix of things’ (CPP 317) was so fundamental to Stevens, he was ever alert to the ways that ideology and religion can change our apprehension of it. To put this differently, a Christian will view the physical things of the world in a different way from a post-Christian. Stevens became preoccupied with the figures of philosophers, rabbis, ideologues, poets and military leaders who helped shape our understanding of the world. Some are better than others (for instance, Nietzsche is better than Lenin in ‘Description Without Place’), but all of them help create new ‘centres’, new systems of concentricity by which to classify the world, which include the grand abstractions of international politics as well as the view out the window onto Asylum Avenue. These figures come and go (he enjoys watching Lenin go), and this fluid modernity seems to contrast with the two millennia of Christian stability. However, anecdotes of early Christianity reveal a similar instability, and this becomes a kind of consolation for Stevens. All those medieval and Renaissance paintings that depict the seven angels blowing trumpets are no longer signs of the ideological hegemony of Christianity, but proof that it is just as fluid as any ideology knocking about today. Also, the post-Christian is never free of Christianity, but the legacy forms the way

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we perceive and understand the world. This is what Stevens’ late poetry acknowledges.

II First, what are the references to early Christianity? Perhaps the most important one is to the Emperor Constantine I (c.280–337 CE) in the last canto of ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’, where Stevens talks of ‘Flickings from finikin to fine finikin / And the general fidget from busts of Constantine / To photographs of the late president, Mr. Blank’ (CPP 416). When Yeats wished to characterize briefly the course of Christian history in the preceding two millennia in his poem ‘The Second Coming’, he described a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, thus implying that the beginning of the era – the era that is now ending – came with the birth of Jesus Christ. Stevens, however, displays more historical discrimination through his choice of Constantine. Christianity would arguably have remained an unimportant sect in the Middle East had not Constantine, as Roman Emperor, converted to it, and thus bringing the Empire with him, and created what we would come to know as Christendom. Stevens’ image conjures up a pantheon of world leaders, stretching back 20 centuries (and implies Harry S. Truman was something of a non-entity), along with complex changes of religion and ideology. Stevens has a vision of this complexity (‘These are the edgings and inchings of final form, / The swarming activities of the formulae / Of statement’ [CPP 417]), as well as a vision of the complex work of culture that emerges from it. But these activities do not remain in the zone of historical abstraction: they impact on perceptions of the immediate physical world, and it is noteworthy that most of this final canto contains descriptions of this. One might fairly inquire where in New Haven is Constantine to be found; Stevens insists that he may be in the finest nuances, in ‘a shade that traverses / A dust, a force that traverses a shade’ (CPP 417). Of course, I am pushing Constantine into the final lines, whereas Stevens means that the whole complex panoply of Western history is to be found in those shades, dusts and forces. The word ‘finikin’ is of note: this implies a level that is just beneath the surface of perception. These are the considerations and nuances that we cannot be aware of and function at the same time. Constantine is somewhere there, among the other swarms of residual significance; but he is there. Nostalgically we imagine that in the Christian era all these finikins were orchestrated into a grand teleology, drifting with clockwork precision towards the eschaton. But now there is a plurality of organizing centres, evanescent, of varying force and duration, ‘A philosopher practicing scales on his piano, / A woman writing a note and tearing it up’ (CPP 417). But with the reference to Constantine, as earlier to Jerome, Stevens insists on the historical contingency of Christianity, even as he acknowledges its importance. Constantine, like Jerome, belongs to the fourth century CE, and indeed Jerome’s Vulgate was

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necessary as a fixed text in Latin to consolidate the conversion of the Roman Empire. Thus does Stevens acknowledge the contingency of this seemingly marmoreal narrative. That acknowledgement is made elsewhere in ‘An Ordinary Evening’ through references to saints and sanctity. (It is worth noting here that the institution of sainthood arose in between the first and fourth centuries CE.) Canto III addresses an ‘ancientest saint ablaze with ancientest truth’, instructing him to say that ‘next to holiness is the will thereto’ (CPP 398). This marks the shift from a Christian idea of holiness – etymologically an apprehension or enjoyment of Christian wholeness – to the swarming activities of the perception of New Haven. The canto’s final line, ‘A porcelain, as yet in the bats thereof’ (CPP 398), conveys massive potentiality: a new vessel can be made of modernity, and its maker does not consign the ‘ancientest saint’ to the dust heap, but invokes him and negotiates with him. Mention of the bats also implies that culture in a time of modernity must work on, or be, what Stevens elsewhere refers to as ‘a cure of the ground’ (CPP 446). To some readers, this might seem to replay ‘Sunday Morning’ as the sensual world replaces the tomb in Palestine. There is no doubt that Stevens remains post-Christian. However, the change that I wish to mark here is his recuperation of the images of early Christianity in order to add force to his argument. The poem presents ‘The eye’s plain version’ (CPP 397), the real, ‘the hotel instead of the hymns’ (CPP 402). But Stevens’ plain, ordinary reality is not perceived by turning away from older ideas of sanctity, but rather by showing how those ideas are folded into New Haven. The line about the hotel and hymns is from canto IX, one of the poem’s points d’appui. It begins by insisting that ‘We keep coming back and coming back / To the real’ (CPP 402). The implication here is that we come back to it after complex flights of abstraction, trope and deviation. The work of culture takes us along these intricate paths and we lose sight of the physical world. So Stevens figures plainness as punctuation and recalibration of that work: ‘We seek / Nothing beyond reality.’ But the crucial qualifier comes next: Within it, Everything, the spirit’s alchemicana Included, the spirit that goes roundabout And through included, not merely the visible, The solid, but the movable, the moment, The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints, The pattern of the heavens and high, night air. (CPP 402) This volta displays most clearly Stevens’ thinking. The enjambment across tercets at the beginning is intense and forceful: having denied everything


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beyond reality, Stevens then turns to find ‘everything’ within reality. ‘Alchemicana’ is yet another of Stevens’ nonce words; here I take it to mean the sum of hocus-pocus that the human spirit has been forever involved in. (The word seems to be formed on the pattern of ‘Americana’.) The ‘spirit’s alchemicana’ are the ‘perquisites of sanctity’ that Stevens refers to in canto XIII, and ‘perquisite’ is used in its legal sense, as a casual profit in addition to regular revenue. The post-Christian thinker should not shun these perquisites: they are his birthright, even as he rejects the idea of God, and lives, as Stevens puts it elsewhere, ‘in a land // Without a god’ (CPP 385). But it is important that they are designated as perquisites, that is, they are no longer central to the way he views the world. Their importance must be acknowledged, but equally so too must their ‘fated eccentricity’ (CPP 380). Witness the grand cadence that brings canto IX above to a close: the ‘highness’ of the night resounds with religious meaning, even as it proclaims that the work of culture is irreversibly secular. He retains the ‘dense investiture’ (CPP 400) of the saints, in order to make this secular poem resonate. Jerome appears again in The Auroras of Autumn, in the poem ‘The Old Lutheran Bells at Home’, in the saintly company of Paul, John, Francis, Martin and Juan. (The Lutheran faith recognizes saints.) John is possibly John of Chrysostom, a contemporary of Jerome and Church Father; Martin is possibly Martin of Tours, another fourth-century saint. As with Constantine, the saints are invoked in order to suggest the long course of Western history: ‘These are the voices of the pastors calling / And calling like the long echoes in long sleep, / Generations of shepherds to generations of sheep’ (CPP 394). But this course is not presented in order to assert a unitary faith, however passé, but rather, again, to suggest plurality – ‘Each truth is a sect though no bells ring for it’ – and the poem ends with the somewhat comic image of the sextons dangling from the bell ropes, their feet kicking. Stevens’ interest in genealogy during the period gives these ‘generations’ a more positive spin than we might expect from so Emersonian a poet. Respect for ancestors – in Stevens’ case the Pennsylvania Dutch, and also those from New Jersey – is the keynote of the poems he wrote in the late 1940s and early 1950s. They become a source of consolation and imaginative strength for him. In their lineaments he also sees a deeper, longer Church tradition, going back to the early Middle Ages, full of conflicts between contingency (for instance, Jerome’s tubas) and the rage for order (again, the Church’s desire that Jerome’s Vulgate become the authoritative text). He remarks that ‘Each sexton has his sect’, which acknowledges the schisms that have characterized Church history, but the next sentence qualifies this: ‘The bells have none’ (CPP 394). I understand that Stevens is saying that the church bells of every sect resonate harmoniously with the whole Christian past, in spite of the fissiparous nature of religious communities.

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III I have remarked that such matters of Jerome, the sects of Pennsylvania, the Emperor Constantine and so on, had a profound effect on the way Stevens represented the physical world. I now wish to bring that mode of representation into better focus, and to do so I would like to turn to an event in December of 1890 when a French teacher of English inscribed a sonnet on a fan as a gift to his wife. Here is the sonnet, ‘Éventail (de Madame Mallarmé)’: Avec comme pour langage Rien qu’un battement aux cieux Le futur vers se dégage Du logis très précieux Aile tout bas la courrière Cet éventail si c’est lui Le même par qui derrière Toi quelque miroir à lui Limpide (où va redescendre Pourchassée en chaque grain Un peu d’invisible cendre Seule à me rendre chagrin) Toujours tel il apparaisse Entre tes mains sans paresse (56) In my reading of this poem, Mallarmé is asking whence the work of culture comes in the post-Christian era. He says that it is from a ‘logis très précieux’ (‘its precious dwelling-place’ [57]), and indeed the first five lines of the poem contain angelic imagery of wings, and possibly religious address. But, of course, the readers – and the receiver of the gift – already know that the wing is that of the fan, and the poem risks becoming merely a pretty piece of vers d’occasion. At least two generations of critics had difficulty with Mallarmé’s more frivolous side, and only now is attention being paid to, say, the fact that he edited several issues of a fashion magazine. The important thing to note is that when we fully realize that Mallarmé is only referring to the fan he gave to his wife as the ‘logis très précieux’ from which will emerge future poetry (and when reading Mallarmé one must let that word ‘vers’ resonate etymologically to mean, more generally, a turn – of both the spirit and of culture), he is not being ironic. The logis of Christianity is no longer there to provoke and generate culture, and all one is left with are the trivial objects of existence. But Mallarmé does not dismiss them as merely trivial; rather, they carry


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all our affection and spiritual motions. Though they might seem too paltry to freight these things, Madame Mallarmé’s hands move ‘Toujours . . . sans paresse’ (‘Always . . . never idle’ [57]). He is talking of eternal things once again: the whole universe is upheld by the incessant movements of his wife’s fan. That fan – decorated with the very text that it generated – belongs to what Stevens would later refer to as ‘the miraculous multiplex of lesser poems’ (CPP 379) which make up the poem of the world. With its mixture of the slapstick and the solemn, Stevens’ poem ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’ finds a profound harmony with Mallarmé’s. The facets of the central poem are described as containing: every prodigal, familiar fire, And unfamiliar escapades: whirroos And scintillant sizzlings such as children like, Vested in the serious folds of majesty, Moving around and behind, a following, A source of trumpeting seraphs in the eye, A source of pleasant outbursts on the ear. (CPP 379–80) The ‘whirroos’ and firecrackers are folded, seriously, with majesty in the very next line here: they are not merely trivial. Also worthy of remark is the way that Stevens plays changes on ‘familiar’ and its antonym, suggestive of the ‘generations’ to be found in ‘The Old Lutheran Bells’ and elsewhere. That the fire is ‘prodigal’ suggests a wasteful extravagance, but also the Biblical parable. The fire is ‘familiar’ in that it has been known for centuries, a fire of Pentecost that has been passed down from generation to generation, ‘familiarized’ in human history. But Stevens insists that this is only part of the story: there must also be ‘unfamiliar escapades’, a new strange breaking free from restraint, a new wasteful extravagance. These new escapades do not banish the old angels that Jerome referred to (‘septem angelos . . . septem tubae’), but involve them in new beginnings. These ‘trumpeting seraphs’ are not imprisoned in the friezes of European churches, but in the eye, the very eye that looks out over a ‘land // Without a god’. The giant that Stevens then glimpses in the land can take on ‘angelic’ aspects, and also becomes a ‘prodigious person, patron of origins’ (CPP 380). The last phrase concludes the penultimate verse, and prompts Stevens to cry out in the next: ‘That’s it’, the moment of eureka, the Greek cry of ‘I have found it!’ What has he found? Why is this phrase – ‘prodigious person, patron of origins’ – such an important breakthrough? The word ‘patron’ comes from the Latin for father, and it has a long and varied etymology and sequence of denotations. It obviously connotes ‘patron saint’, and for many centuries the word ‘patron’ denoted that alone. In the Christian churches, the OED

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remarks, it still denotes ‘a person who holds the right of presentation to an ecclesiastical benefice’. Although some readers might feel that Stevens has in mind the idea of artistic patronage, that does not square with the strong religious imagery throughout the poem, and indeed throughout the poetry of this period. These considerations that arise from the word ‘patron’ echo in the later poem, ‘Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly’. Stevens presents a mildly satirical portrait of Emerson as transcendentalist who would ‘think away the grass, the trees, the clouds’ (CPP 439). The poem turns against such an approach, and asserts the value of that grass, those trees, those clouds – in short the physical world – but it does so while taking into account the ancient generations: The afternoon is visibly a source, Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm, Too much like thinking to be less than thought, Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch, A daily majesty of meditation, That comes and goes in silences of its own. (CPP 440) Here the parent and patriarch, however obscure, are part of the ‘daily majesty of meditation’, not a restriction of reality, of the type purveyed by Mr Homburg. The surname suggests the hat that was popular in mid-century among politicians and general pillars of society (Stevens had more time for sombreros, if not to wear himself, then at least in his poetry). The parents, the patriarchs and patron, however obscure, count for more than Mr Homburg. But more important than this is the word ‘origin’ in the plural. The implication is profound. (Elsewhere he speaks disparagingly of ‘origin’ in the singular [CPP 411].) Stevens is modifying his idea of 1942, when he figured a chronology ‘From that ever-early candor to its late plural’ (CPP 331). Yes, the present still has a plurality of ‘letters, prophecies, perceptions’ (CPP 380) and so on, but these have a corresponding plurality of origins, all of them contingent. After the consolations of Christian teleology, this sounds like chaos. Indeed the idea of chaos and how it morphs in and out of order is extremely important to Stevens throughout his career. But here Stevens is not talking of chaos. His cry of eureka marks the apprehension of ‘the total / Of letters, prophecies, perceptions’ (italics mine). It is close to mystical revelation; perhaps the closest modernity can get to it. Contingency seems to imply instability (and instability suggests chaos); but contingency has created tradition, and while tradition does not have the solidity of eternal truth and universal validity, it does hold firm in more local settings (in Ephrata, for instance, or Oley, as he notes in ‘Credences of Summer’).


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Charles Altieri is perhaps the critic who has written best on the peculiar mixture of abstraction and particularity that Stevens propounds in such moments; I would not challenge the tenor of his argument except to remark how historicized Stevens’ modern mysticism is. He arrives at it in part through meditation on the Christian past and its intersections with profane history. He is preoccupied in this period by ‘the long echoes in long sleep, / Generations of shepherds [calling] to generations of sheep’ (CPP 394). Respect for this tradition makes stronger the strong imagination.

IV Writing this chapter for a book on the Transatlantic aspects of Stevens prompts me to remark on the way that he repeatedly thought about these matters through comparisons between America and Europe. Although I have commented on the alignment of sympathies between Mallarmé and Stevens (which is part of Stevens’ late preoccupation with Mallarmé’s ephebe, Paul Valéry), Stevens did not consider Europe the home of such a ‘patron of origins’. That was most properly America. Of course, through his purchases of contemporary European art, his deep engagement with European literature and his knowledge of two European languages, he was aware that the Old World had life in it yet. But in his poetry, the old was always Europe and the new, the site of modernity, was always America. On one occasion, it was Oklahoma: Among time’s images, there is not one Of this present, the venerable mask above The dilapidation of dilapidations. The oldest-newest day is the newest alone. The oldest-newest night does not creak by, With lanterns, like a celestial ancientness. Silently it heaves its youthful sleep from the sea – The Oklahoman – the Italian blue Beyond the horizon with its masculine, . . . (CPP 406–7) The repetition of ‘oldest-newest’ echoes my earlier discussion of Stevens’ treatment of ancient saints, obscure parents and patriarchs. If you are to apprehend the present day, then you cannot jettison ‘celestial ancientness’ – this last is enfolded in the blue sky stretching over the horizon. That sky is ‘Oklahoman’, pertaining to a state which was still recovering from the ravages of the Depression, and the opposite of any putative Italian sophistication. The ‘Italian blue’ is the sky of Italy that had been mythologized in so

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much of the finest art (‘time’s images’) – for instance, so much of Canaletto’s canvases is pure sky. To see the blue before your eyes, even though you stand in the United States, you must know this blue of Italy. But there is one further significant aspect of Stevens’ engagement with Europe in the last phase of his career, which brings with it echoes of what I have discussed here, and transforms them. ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’ is addressed to the Spanish philosopher George Santayana who Stevens knew at Harvard College and who died in Rome in 1952. Although he lived in New England for decades, Santayana was never completely at home there and in 1912 he settled finally in Europe, first in Spain and then in Rome. Stevens’ poem reads in parts like the poet’s attempt to understand this choice, as he explains to both the reader and himself how Rome can also be a site for the fluid modernity I discussed above. The danger is to take it as atrophied origin, but Stevens, with greater discrimination and historical awareness, sees something different. With historical fudging one can think that this is a return to the beginning, to the centre of the Roman Empire as it turned to Christendom in the fourth century. But Rome is no origin in this sense: Constantine’s seat was in Byzantium, the city that would later bear his name. Such doubleness chimes with the doubleness that Stevens figures in contemporary Rome: Santayana, at death’s door, is ‘a citizen of heaven though still of Rome’ and thus is able to see both the physical Rome and the ‘Total grandeur of a total edifice’ (CPP 433–4). The sounds drift in. The buildings are remembered. The life of the city never lets go, nor do you Ever want it to. It is part of the life in your room. Its domes are the architecture of your bed. The bells keep on repeating solemn names In choruses and choirs of choruses, . . . (CPP 434) The life of this particular city encompasses more than most: Joachim du Bellay said its limits were the very rondure of the earth and seas. The imagery of bells and choruses reverberates strongly with a poem like ‘The Old Lutheran Bells at Home’ and countless other instances of ecclesiastic imagery in late Stevens. In its length, subject-matter and manner of address the poem is untypical of The Rock. Indeed, it is hard to imagine claims being made for its canonical status. The poem generates itself through paraphrase of its opening theme. Although such paraphrase, or amplification, can be a powerful poetic device on occasion, here the results are static and repetitive. It is noteworthy because it demonstrates that Stevens is not cowed by the eternal city. He does not


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push it away in the manner of other notable Americans such as Emerson or A. R. Ammons. The latter was once asked how he liked his three-month stay in Italy and he responded, ‘I hated it. I’m not interested in all that cultural crap’ (106). The force of Ammons’ repugnance reminds us of Emerson’s disparagement of the Vatican when he visited in 1833; and more generally, it is hard not to see in the position a distrust of the accrued splendour of tradition in favour of the individual. Stevens, on the other hand, because he had thought so much throughout the 1940s and early 1950s about the contingency of European church history and culture, was more discriminating. The choirs of choruses of Rome resonated fully with those of the Lutheran bells in Reading.

V Such a reading of the references to early Christianity in the later poetry of Wallace Stevens returns us a familiar portrait of the poet in which some of the shading and colouring has been changed. It brings nuance to the poet’s relationship with Christianity, showing how his early attitudes to that religion changed during his career. It displays yet another facet of Stevens’ deepening respect for tradition, especially the local traditions of his birthplace, and his growing awareness of his dependence on it. For most of the twentieth century, literary-critical discourse in America has been deeply suspicious of terms such as ‘tradition’ and ‘respect’ in case they would prove to be an obstacle to the individual’s enjoyment of radical freedom. Stevens is not suspicious in this manner. He acknowledges the perquisites of sanctity and he dons the dense investiture, in order to be more truly and more strangely of his place and time.

Notes Research funds for this chapter were provided by a Research Grant from the Czech Ministry of Education, awarded to an interdisciplinary collective at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague (‘Foundations of the Modern World as Reflected in Literature and Philosophy’, MSM0021620824). 1. In a letter to Hi Simons, Stevens explained the reference as being to St Jerome (L 435). The connection has been pursued by Eleanor Cook, both in Poetry, WordPlay, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens (248) and A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens (228). 2. The shift in Stevens’ use of theological language over the course of his career has been analysed in Cook’s Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens. For a more extensive investigation of Stevens in relation to theological debates, see especially David Jarraway’s Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief.

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Works cited Ammons, A. R. Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues. Ed. Zofia Burr. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Biblia Sacra: Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem. Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1969. Cook, Eleanor. Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Cook, Eleanor. A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Graham, Jorie. Interview with Thomas Gardner. Denver Quarterly 26.4 (Spring 1992): 79–104. Jarraway, David R. Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief: Metaphysician in the Dark. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. Kirkendale, Warren. ‘New Roads to Old Ideas in Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis’. Musical Quarterly 56.4 (1970): 665–701. Mallarmé, Stéphane. Collected Poems and Other Verse. Trans. E. H. and A. M. Blackmore. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997.

7 ‘The strange unlike’: Stevens’ Poetics of Resemblance Josh Cohen

I

Introduction: life and its forms He gripped more closely the essential prose As being, in a world so falsified, The one integrity for him, the one Discovery still possible to make, To which all poems were incident, unless That prose should wear a poem’s guise at last. (CPP 29)

Concluding the third of the six sections that make up ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’, these lines parody the metaphysical aspirations of Crispin, its questing protagonist, as he inhales ‘the rancid rosin, burly smells . . . and all the arrant stinks’ emanating from the warehouses lining the Carolina riverbank. These stinks become the sign and seal of Crispin’s ‘rude aesthetic’, in which the authenticity of an essential prose is set against the falsifications of poetry. Yet the final line undermines this pious opposition. Crispin’s ongoing search for the ‘veritable ding an sich . . . free / From the unavoidable shadow of himself’ (CPP 23–4), repeatedly runs up against its own impossibility. If poetry is ‘incidental’, a distorting shadow cast by the subject over its object, it is also the Ding an sich’s necessary guise. Paradoxically, prose can manifest itself only in the guise of a poem. Not content to undermine Crispin’s illusions through its sly narrative asides, the poem enacts their impossibility in its sonic texture. As Martha Strom has persuasively shown, Crispin’s faltering advance towards ‘a “starker, barer world” of verbal restraint’ (24) is perpetually thrown off course by the percussive obstacles of ‘the sounds of the letter C’, whose sibilant soft and ‘concussive’ hard forms fatally distort the prosaic reality towards which Crispin vainly gestures.1 This predicament casts intriguing light on Stevens’ apparently unremarkable statement that ‘poetry is words; and that words, above everything else, are, in poetry, sounds’ (CPP 663). For sound is what 107

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separates Crispin, and the poem itself, from the essential prose. If, as one of the ‘Adagia’ tells us, ‘[l]ife is not free from its forms’ (CPP 909), then the hope of attaining the unadorned prose of things as they are can only end in disappointment. That Stevens is sceptical of any claim to perceive life beyond or outside its imaginative forms is, of course, a critical commonplace. It is the basis for identifying him as the most Transatlantic of poets, in whom a disillusioned American reality of the ‘slovenly wilderness’ (CPP 60) and the ‘skreaking and skrittering’ grackle (CPP 129) is subjected to Symbolist transfiguration. In an exemplary reading along these lines, Albert Gelpi contrasts Williams’ Imagist with Stevens’ Symbolist poetics with the nicely compressed formulation: ‘In [Imagism], consciousness commits subject to object; in [Symbolism], consciousness commits object to subject’ (13). My reservation here is that such a formulation keeps intact the very opposition between subject and object that Stevens puts in question. Put another way, it assumes a life free from its forms. Beginning from a reading of ‘Nuances of a Theme by Williams’ (1918), a poem that explicitly stages these poetic differences, this chapter will challenge the tendency to oppose Stevens’ ‘French’ idealism to Williams’ ‘American’ materialism. For Stevens, ‘French and English constitute a single language’ (CPP 914). Stevens is no less committed than Williams to the primacy of the object; but for Stevens the object cannot be experienced apart from the forms it assumes. The essential prose of ‘English’ lives in and through the imaginative alienations of ‘French’. This conception of the relationship of life to its forms is helpfully illuminated by Jean-Luc Nancy in his bold reading of Freud’s book on Witz. Nancy distinguishes between the Freudian conception of the dream as compromise, in which the content of the dream is subjected to the formal ordering of censorship, and that of Witz, or the joke. A Witz is not a partially censored or distorted unconscious wish, but the unconscious wish itself given form: ‘Witz does not give passage [to elements of the repressed] under the cover of the form, but rather because this form is itself already an irruption of the repressed’ (221). Jokes are not compromised forms of the repressed, but the very means by which the unconscious ‘fundament’ of mental life takes form: in Witz, ‘the formless forms itself ’ (ibid.). Form, that is, is not a secondary imposition upon, but a part of, the thing formed. Crispin’s discovery that the integral truth he seeks is accessible only via the dissimulating ‘guise’ of poetry is, I want to argue, the very paradox Nancy unearths in showing the formless truth of the unconscious to manifest itself only in the form of Witz. Stevens’ poetry persistently mines or ‘nuances’ this paradox. My concern here, then, is less with Stevens’ use of Witz than with his persistent mining or ‘nuancing’ of the paradoxical structure at its heart. In other words, I am transposing from Freud and Nancy to Stevens the logic rather than the content of Witz: how the formless forms itself.

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My reading of ‘Nuances’ will be amplified by briefer readings of later poems as well as by Blanchot’s reading of Mallarmé, which casts Stevens’ debt to Symbolism, and, more obliquely, the American tradition, in a different light.

II

Nuances of resemblance It’s a strange courage you give me, ancient star: Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part! I Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze, that reflects neither my face nor any inner part of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing. II Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses you in its own light. Be not chimera of morning, Half-man, half-star. Be not an intelligence, Like a widow’s bird Or an old horse. (CPP 14–15)

At the head of the poem is the brief text of ‘El Hombre’, a lyric from Williams’ 1917 collection Al Que Quiere! Central to ‘El Hombre’ is its paradoxical mode of address. To apostrophize an object is to locate it in the speaker’s world, and so to establish an imaginative relationship with it. But the star’s imaginative absorption by the poet is simultaneously an exclusion of the poet. The star’s solitude becomes the exemplary poetic stance, its defiant autonomy vis-àvis the sun figuring the speaker’s ‘strange courage’ in the face of the rest of humanity. Yet this figure is also a renunciation of figuration, an injunction to resist all metaphoric appropriation; the star is likened to the poet only insofar as it refuses any likeness, standing resolutely and exclusively for itself. By ‘nuancing’ his source poem, Stevens puts in question its central premiss. The proud uniqueness displayed by the star, felt by his human counterpart and embodied in the poem itself, seems to defy incorporation and revision by another poem. The light of Williams’ poem would ‘lend no part’ to that of Stevens’, reject the implied resemblance.

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At first glance, Stevens seems merely to deepen and extend Williams’ injunction to the star. It glosses the first (‘Shine alone’) and last (‘lend no part’) phrases of Williams’ second couplet, offering a number of nuances on each. Thus, to shine alone is also to ‘shine nakedly’, ‘like bronze’, ‘like fire’, which reflect neither ‘face’ nor ‘inner part’ of the poet. Stevens fully elaborates the predicament merely implied in ‘El Hombre’, of the poet’s impossible desire to find himself mirrored in that which ‘mirrors nothing’. The star is strictly alien to all resemblances, and yet its very singularity opens the play of metaphor it should shut down. It is as if the source poem is pulled in opposing directions. On the one hand, the clear mutual reflection of man and star in Williams’ poem gives way to a mutual obscuring, a darkening of the mirror of metaphor. On the other hand, the star’s glorious unlikeness to anything else is likened to substances – fire, bronze – which likewise shine without reflection. This intimation of a mode of resemblance which estranges rather than clarifies the object of resemblance warrants a detour from Stevens’ poem to his prose, specifically his discussion of this question in ‘Three Academic Pieces’ (1947). Although this lecture was published some 24 years after Harmonium – and some 29 years after the poet wrote ‘Nuances’ – Stevens’ theory of resemblance elaborated in the later lecture clearly illuminates the earlier poem. In ‘Three Academic Pieces’ Stevens observes that ‘in some sense, all things resemble each other’ (CPP 686). Resemblance, he continues, is neither imitation of nor identity with the object, but a kind of imaginative stance in which all things are associatively bound to one another. Moreover, insofar as it is the modality by which the world reveals itself, it is integral to the structure of reality itself: ‘the structure of reality because of the range of resemblances that it contains is measurably an adult make-believe’ (CPP 689). Poetry is no more or less than the effort to bring more sharply into focus this structuring of reality by resemblance, and as such is itself ‘a part of the structure of reality’ (CPP 692). It reveals to us the profound and necessary intrication of life and its forms. ‘Someone Puts a Pineapple Together’, the poem that comprises the second of the ‘Three Academic Pieces’, traces the process by which resemblance insinuates itself into reality. Only by becoming ‘An Alp, a purple Southern mountain bisqued // With the molten mixings of related things’, can the pineapple manifest its ownmost self: ‘This is everybody’s world. / Here the total artifice reveals itself // As the total reality’ (CPP 696). Stevens’ strange claim is that to see the pineapple as Alp is not (in the words of ‘Nuances’) to suffuse it in an alien human light, but to disclose an element of its own reality. The pineapple can coincide with itself only by dividing and proliferating itself; its prosaic essence is discovered in and through its poetic guises. The injunction that opens the second stanza of ‘Nuances’ – ‘Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses / you in its own light’ – becomes strikingly slippery when read from this perspective. It appears to amplify Williams’ belief in


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the star as a source of light independent of the sun, and as a figure immune to symbolic capture. The star is to be on guard against the distortions of poetry. Yet for Stevens true poetic light manifests rather than distorts the object. The imagination of the ‘youth as virile poet’ merges imperceptibly with the reality it describes: ‘Like light, it adds nothing, except itself’ (CPP 681). Poetry, then, is as indispensable to clear perception as light. In the first of the three pieces, this insight becomes the basis for an important differentiation of Narcissism from ‘the prime sense of the word. It involves, also, this principle, that as we seek out our resemblances we expect to find pleasure in doing so; that is to say, in what we find’ (CPP 692). Narcissistic pleasure, that is, derives not from the reflection of ourselves in things, but from the irradiation of resemblances in things – this man and that, this woman and that, this year and last: ‘The beginning of time will, no doubt, resemble the end of time’ (CPP 686). Far from being the index of a subjective idealism in which the world exists only through the self, this notion of resemblance dispossesses the subject of its sovereignty. Resemblances are not imposed on reality by an imperial subject; rather, to invoke Nancy once more, they are the modality through which ‘the formless forms itself ’, the ‘total artifice’ proper to and indistinguishable from the ‘total reality’. Fourteen years after Stevens delivered ‘Three Academic Pieces’, Maurice Blanchot would publish ‘Dreaming, Writing’, an essay on Michel Leiris’s ‘dream book’, Nuits sans nuits et quelques jours sans jours. The essay elaborates a notion of resemblance uncannily resonant with Stevens’ (who in 1955 told his correspondent Peter H. Lee, ‘I love Maurice Blanchot’ [L 879]). Leiris impresses Blanchot above all for his austere renunciation of the temptation to interpret his dreams, enabling his reader rather to receive them ‘as they are, in their own light . . . They were dreams: they are signs of poetry’ (142). Poetry adds to dreams only the strange clarity of ‘their own light’ – as for Stevens, it adds to reality ‘nothing, except itself’. Leiris’s discretion vitally preserves the dream’s essential opacity, a quality tied by Blanchot to the bewitching power of resemblance. The resemblant figure in a dream neither mirrors nor designates a real-life counterpart. On the contrary, to resemble is to break down any fixed relation between a sign and its referent, the very relation that sustains everyday perception and communication. This, says Blanchot, accounts for the fascination engendered by a passer-by ‘if, for an instant, he becomes the bearer of some resemblance’ (145). Resemblance dissolves the contours which distinguish one object from another, as in Stevens’ image of a beach in which the colours of the different elements – the green of the sea and palms, the yellow of sun and sand – bleed into each other: ‘the light alone creates a unity not only in the recedings of distance, where differences become invisible, but also in the contacts of closer sight’ (CPP 686). It is this unity which we prefer to expunge from ordinary perception. The face as bearer of resemblance, writes Blanchot, ‘attracts us, haunts us, familiar and remote, yet also frightens us a

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little; we are in a hurry to identify it, to erase it by redirecting it to the circle of things in which living men are so bound up with themselves that they are without resemblance’ (145). Identification is in this sense narcissistic in what Stevens calls ‘the prime sense of the word’, for it expunges the spectral otherness from nature, reducing the object to a reassuring reflection of the subject. Is it not this distinction between identity and resemblance which governs Stevens’ ‘nuancing’ of Williams? The star ‘mirrors nothing’, and as such refuses redirection into the familiar circle of things – ‘Star is all and only star, not “half-man”’ (Gelpi 16). It is to defy the fate of the ‘widow’s bird’ or ‘old horse’, figures divested of their animal otherness, mere narcissistic extensions of human interests. Yet this insistence on the non-identity of the star opens it to the play of resemblance. Its relation to bronze and fire is not one of identity or imitation but of resemblance. Star, bronze and fire shatter the mirror that would reflect them, disclosing ‘a neutral power of resembling, which exists prior to any particular designation’ (Blanchot, ‘Dreaming, Writing’ 145). In the world of resemblance, objects exist without a corresponding representation. The resembler ‘resembles no one or an ungraspable Someone’ (ibid.) and so makes apparent the void that conditions both dream and writing. From this perspective, the claim of one of the ‘Adagia’ that ‘Poetry is a search for the inexplicable’ (CPP 911) points to the irreducible enigma into which any attempt to identify the object of resemblance leads. Read with Blanchot, the effect of Stevens’ ‘nuancing’ is to render Williams’ star uncanny, ‘familiar and remote’ (‘Dreaming, Writing’ 145). The proud solitude and singularity of Williams’ star remains in a relationship of correspondence with the ‘strange courage’ of the poet. Indeed, it is tempting to see in this strange courage a condensed figure of Williams’ American poetic. It evokes many of the later solitary heroes celebrated in In the American Grain (1925) – the massive, self-contained George Washington, for example, with his ‘reputation for truthtelling’, ‘too strong to want to evade anything’, and despised as such by the ‘crawling mass’ that gnawed on him resentfully (141). The very singularity of Washington and his like breeds disappointment, condemning their successors to the status of pale imitation: ‘They are a kind of American swan song, each one’ (143). The idiom of the ‘American grain’ mimes this rugged heroism, rendering the object with a vitality and immediacy which affirms its uniqueness. Stevens’ ‘Nuances’ both radicalizes and alienates this American grain, clearing from the object all residues of mirroring correspondence, leaving the star in a state of ‘pure resemblance’ (Blanchot, ‘Dreaming, Writing’ 145) without representation. It is in this sense, I suggest, that he insinuates French into English. In what reads as a kind of oblique tribute to Williams’ objective poetics, Stevens declares in ‘To the One of Fictive Music’, ‘That music is intensest which proclaims / The near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom’. The poem’s concluding stanza, however, qualifies this claim: ‘Yet not too like, yet not so like to be / Too near, too clear, saving a little to


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endow / Our feigning with the strange unlike’ (CPP 71). The ‘American’ poetic which brings such proximity and clarity to the object should not seek to close the gap between the object and its image; the precision of a likeness should maintain a little space for the ‘strange unlike’, the uncanny dimension of resemblance.

III

The hollow of the poem

The possibilities of a poetry freed from the tyranny of the mirror, hinted at in ‘Nuances’, are more fully and insistently elaborated in the various poems (from ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ to ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’) which turn on ‘the expression of the experience of poetry’ (CPP 904). This conception of poetry’s task positions Stevens in a Romantic as well as a Symbolist lineage. In Schlegel as in Mallarmé, every individual poem attests to an impossible struggle to transcend its own limits and attain the status of what Schlegel calls ‘poetry itself’ (Philosophical Fragments 32). The poem’s desire to coincide with its own ideal cannot, of course, be fulfilled; indeed, it derives its meaning from this impossibility. The romantic kind of poetry is still in a state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected. It can be exhausted by no theory and only a divinatory criticism would dare try to characterize its ideal. It alone is infinite, just as it alone is free . . . The romantic kind of poetry is the only one that is more than a kind, that is, as it were, poetry itself: for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be romantic. (ibid.) It is this state of becoming that characterizes what Stevens calls ‘nobility’ in ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’. The Romantic and the noble each name that element of the poem which ‘resolves itself into an enormous number of vibrations, movements, changes. To fix it is to put an end to it’ (CPP 664). The freedom and infinity that Schlegel refers to is the condition of a poetry no longer bound to this or that content, but given over to the experience of ‘poetry itself’. This experience is infinite because poetry itself can never be revealed as such, but only in and through its numberless instances. Poetry is in this sense a state of resemblance – it radiates from a fictive, insubstantial origin, a ‘no one or an ungraspable Someone’ with whom it never coincides. Rather than fixing the image it reflects, Schlegel claims, Romantic poetry ‘can raise that reflection again and again to a higher power, can multiply it in an endless succession of mirrors’ (Philosophical Fragments 32).2 A multiplication of this kind is staged in ‘Nuances’, where a proliferation of metaphors and similes, a restless mirroring of ‘vibrations, movements, changes’, goes hand in hand with a shattering of the mirror of representation that would fix the image and so ‘put an end to it’.

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The concern with the experience of poetry finds expression, in Schlegel, Mallarmé and Stevens alike, in the dream of a total work in which all works are concentrated. In Ideas, his last collection of fragments, Schlegel will speak of ‘a perfect literature’ in which ‘all books’ become ‘a single book, and in such an eternally developing book, the gospel of humanity and culture will be revealed’ (Philosophical Fragments 103). Mallarmé, of course, will similarly envisage a total Book attaining the ultimate coincidence of poetry and reality, ‘Music of total fullness and clarity, the totality of universal relationships’ (‘Crisis’ 42). The affinity of these motifs to Stevens’ ‘supreme fiction’, first claimed by Hi Simons in his famous article on Stevens and Mallarmé in 1946, has since become a commonplace of Stevens criticism, albeit a contested one. Du-Hyoung Kang, for example, argues that Stevens is to be differentiated from the Symbolist aesthetic inasmuch as he refuses the Mallarméan split between Real and Ideal. Where for Mallarmé poetry always falls despairingly short of its ideal of ‘azure’ stasis and immobility, Stevens’ refusal to think the ideal apart from the real engenders a poetic of ceaseless change. Kang relies for this opposition on a rather formulaic reading of the Mallarméan Ideal. Blanchot, in contrast, at once the most rigorous and passionate reader of Mallarmé, refutes this transcendentalist construal of the Book, and so brings more clearly into focus its significance for Stevens’ poetics. Far from being the fruit of rarefied abstraction, Blanchot argues, Mallarmé’s conception of poetic language affirms above all the matter of words. Ordinary language prefers to forget the word’s annihilation of the thing it designates, and functions as if, on the contrary, it existed to make that thing present: ‘everyday speech . . . hands us over to the presence from which it is supposed to defend us’ (‘Dreaming, Writing’ 31). Language perpetrates a ruse from which poetry does not escape: it is that ‘movement of negation by which things are separated from themselves and destroyed’; but this very movement is the means by which things come to be ‘known, subjugated, communicated’ (‘Literature’ 330). The word is thus the condition both of the thing’s annihilation and its communication, its absence in reality and its recovery in representation: ‘If poetry exists, it is because language is an instrument of communication’ (‘Myth of Mallarmé’ 30). Poetry lives off both this communicative function and the ‘[d]ensity and sonorous thickness’ (37) which signifies beyond communication. As such, ‘[i]t necessarily tricks us; bad faith and lies are its virtues’ (41). This ‘trickery and play’ is less a conscious strategy than a structural predicament of poetry, in that it can reach towards the silence it craves only by means of language: ‘silence, to express itself, calls on something material’ (37). Silence is not an ideal beyond language, but a possibility embedded imperceptibly inside it. This is a distinction lost on the ‘anti-master-man’ of Stevens’ ‘Landscape with Boat’. The solitary line at the head of the poem presenting this ‘floribund ascetic’ (CPP 220) mimics his quasi-Platonist stance, disdainfully surveying


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the material fray of language from above. The jocose neologism ‘floribund’ suggests that the asceticism of his moribund enterprise to witness transcendence in its naked clarity is belied by its own florid rhetoric. The stanza that follows conveys the Sisyphean frustration to which this desire is condemned: He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds, Then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still The sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air. He wanted to see. He wanted the eye to see And not be touched by blue. He wanted to know, A naked man who regarded himself in the glass Of air, who looked for the world beneath the blue, Without blue, without any turquoise tint or phase, Any azure under-side or after-color. (CPP 220) Possessed by the fantasy of seeing life ‘free from its forms’, the ascetic imagines himself metamorphosed into Emerson’s ‘transparent eyeball’, his disembodied flesh mirrored in the disembodied world, glass of ‘imperceptible air’. He brushes away the noisy rhetoric and distortions of thunder, clouds and religious illusion, to find that the sky’s blueness remains, sovereignly indifferent to his efforts to erase it. In his well-known article on their affinities, Hi Simons painstakingly traces common uses of colour, and especially blue, imagery in Stevens and Mallarmé. The latter’s ‘L’Azur’ (1864), he shows, resonates unmistakably in ‘Landscape’ (Simons 241–2). For the speaker of ‘L’Azur’, the blue of sky is at once gateway and barrier to the imperceptible, blocking the very pathway to the ideal it promises to open.3 As in ‘Landscape’, the azure mocks the aspiration to penetrate beyond it: En vain! l’Azur triomphe, et je l’entends qui chante Dans les cloches. Mon âme, il se fait voix pour plus Nous faire peur avec sa victoire méchante, Et du métal vivant sort en bleus angélus! (In vain! The Azure triumphs. I hear it sing In all the bells. The more to frighten us, It rises in its wicked glorying From living metal, a blue angelus.) (Collected Poems 19–20) The silence of the azure is not the transcendent beyond of heaven, but an uncanny resonance haunting the music of the bells from the inside (‘Je suis

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hanté’, cries the poet in the final line), a ‘wicked’ ideal because consigned to the all too material form of ‘living metal’. Blueness, the ‘azure under-side’ which Stevens’ ascetic cannot scratch away, stubbornly clings to the world’s surfaces, mocking the ascetic’s longing for ‘A truth beyond all truths’ (CPP 220). To this airy illusion, Stevens counterposes a different, more difficult truth: He never supposed That he might be truth, himself, or part of it, That the things that he rejected might be part And the irregular turquoise, part, the perceptible blue Grown denser, part, the eye so touched, so played Upon by clouds, the ear so magnified By thunder, parts, and all these things together, Parts, and more things, parts. He never supposed divine Things might not look divine, nor that if nothing Was divine then all things were, the world itself, And that if nothing was the truth, then all Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth. (CPP 220–1) The drive to cleanse artifice from the world misses the strange coincidence of ‘the total artifice’ with ‘the total reality’. Truth is to be found not beyond the variegated shadings of ‘perceptible blue’, the distortions of thunder and clouds, but scattered amongst them, in the disarticulated parts which make up the world. Truth is ‘nothing’, but this nothingness resounds in all things, a benign transfiguration of the ‘wicked glorying’ of the azure in Mallarmé’s bells. As Blanchot suggests, the Mallarméan Book is best understood as this ‘nothing’ which haunts ‘all / Things’: And, we see, this book of which one must dream, which is the Book, equivalent of the world, orphic explanation of the Earth, is not so much the Great Work, destined to sum up the universe, a microcosm that could hold everything, as the hollow of this totality, its other side, its realized absence, that is to say, the ability to express everything, thus an ability that is itself withdrawn from everything and expressed by nothing. (‘Myth of Mallarmé’ 36) As ‘Landscape’ suggests, echoing the title of the collection from which it comes, there is no world beyond its parts. It is this absence of a uniting whole, this ‘hollow’ of all things, which is named by the Book and revealed in the insistence of blue. This hollow evades the ascetic’s attempts to seize it as a positive object of perception. As ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ repeatedly


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suggests, the truth responds to this appropriative gesture by diffusing itself ever more elusively amongst the world’s – or the poem’s – parts: and yet so poisonous Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to The truth itself, the first idea becomes The hermit in a poet’s metaphors, Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day. (CPP 330) The ‘first idea’ exists only in the metaphors that conceal it, which is why poetry, precisely as search for the first idea, is condemned to ‘trickery and play’, to coming and going all day. It leads us not to the Absolute Knowledge that completes Hegel’s system, but to the ignorance that is its hollow. In quest of the supreme fiction, ‘You must become an ignorant man again’ (CPP 329). The thought returns us to Schlegel, who in 1800 would pre-empt Freud in speaking of ‘incomprehensibility’ as the very foundation of life itself: ‘But is incomprehensibility really something so unmitigatedly contemptible and evil? . . . [I]sn’t this entire, unending world constructed by the understanding out of incomprehensibility or chaos?’ (‘On Incomprehensibility’ 305). I have tried to show that Stevens’ poetry fashions a space for the preservation of this incomprehensibility from the presumptuous metaphysics of Crispin, the ascetic and their like. It is this impulse, allying him to the uncanny aesthetics of Schlegel, Mallarmé and Blanchot, that estranges him from Williams’ emphatic preference for ‘the near and the clear’. Again and again, Stevens exposes this native poetic of ‘likest issuance’ to the alien power of the ‘strange unlike’. In so doing, he makes perceptible – but barely – the contours of that ‘single language’ constituted by English and French.

Notes 1. Strom points to a letter written by Stevens 20 years after the poem’s publication, offering a ‘cypher’ for its title: ‘ “I can state it, perhaps, by changing the title to this: THE COMEDIAN AS THE SOUNDS OF THE LETTER C”’ (qtd in Strom 21). 2. For a useful discussion of Stevens’ Romanticism as specifically Schlegelian, see Joseph Kronick, ‘The Metamorphic Stevens’. A different take on Stevens and Schlegel can be found in Anthony Whiting’s The Never-Resting Mind: Wallace Stevens’ Romantic Irony. 3. In his commentary on the poem, Mallarmé’s translator Henry Weinfield helpfully points out that the term ‘azur’ came into circulation amongst nineteenth-century French as a metonymy for ‘ciel’, whose double meaning of ‘sky’ and ‘heaven’ was overly freighted with religious associations. Like Stevens’ ascetic, Mallarmé’s speaker seeks an ideal purified of divinity. See Mallarmé, Collected Poems 163.

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Works cited Blanchot, Maurice. ‘Literature and the Right to Death’. Trans. Lydia Davis. The Work of Fire. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. 300–44. Blanchot, Maurice. ‘The Myth of Mallarmé’. Trans. Charlotte Mandel. The Work of Fire. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. 27–42. Blanchot, Maurice. ‘Dreaming, Writing’. Friendship. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. 140–8. Gelpi, Albert. ‘Stevens and Williams: The Epistemology of Modernism’. Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism. Ed. Albert Gelpi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 3–23. Kang, Du-Hyoung. ‘Stasis Versus Continuity: Mallarmé and Wallace Stevens’. The Wallace Stevens Journal 13.1 (Spring 1989): 38–52. Kronick, Joseph. ‘The Metamorphic Stevens’. The Wallace Stevens Journal 6.1/2 (Spring 1982): 3–9. Mallarmé, Stéphane. ‘Crisis in Verse’. Mallarmé: Selected Poems, Essays and Letters. Ed. and trans. Bradford Cook. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956. 34–43. Mallarmé, Stéphane. Collected Poems. Ed. and trans. Henry Weinfield. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Nancy, Jean-Luc. ‘In Statu Nascendi’. The Birth to Presence. Trans. Brian Holmes et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. 211–33. Schlegel, Friedrich. Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1991. Schlegel, Friedrich. ‘On Incomprehensibility’. Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics. Ed. Jay Bernstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 297–307. Simons, Hi. ‘Wallace Stevens and Mallarmé’. Modern Philology 43.4 (May 1946): 235–59. Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. Strom, Martha. ‘The Comedian as the Sounds of the Letter C’. The Wallace Stevens Journal 11.1 (Spring 1987): 21–31. Whiting, Anthony. The Never-Resting Mind: Wallace Stevens’ Romantic Irony. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Williams, William Carlos. In the American Grain. New York: New Directions, 1956.


B

ARTISTIC CONVERSATIONS


8 Stevens, Duchamp and the American ‘ism’, 1915–1919 David Haglund

I After leaving Paris for New York during the First World War Marcel Duchamp declared, perhaps conveniently, that the true home of art had also recently moved across the Atlantic. ‘If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished – dead’, he told a reporter for the New York Tribune in September 1915, just a few months after arriving in the States, ‘and that America is the country of the art of the future’ (qtd in Naumann 36). Duchamp was already a minor celebrity in the United States (hence the Tribune interview) thanks to his Nude Descending a Staircase, a large Cubist painting that caused a popular sensation at the Armory Show of 1913. When he arrived in New York City he was met by Walter Pach, the Armory Show’s principal European connection, who introduced him to Walter Arensberg, a wealthy American collector who had already purchased one version of the famous Nude and would later purchase the definitive version. Duchamp was soon living and painting in Arensberg’s spacious Upper West Side apartment. On a Monday afternoon that August Arensberg telephoned his Harvard friend Wallace Stevens and asked him to dinner with the artist and himself at the Brevoort Hotel in Greenwich Village. The Brevoort was a short ride from Stevens’ apartment in Chelsea, and its very Gallic café, run by the French restaurateur Raymond Orteig, had become a popular meeting-place for the literary and artistic avant-garde. At the Brevoort, Arensberg, Duchamp and Stevens spoke French together, ‘like sparrows around a pool of water’, as Stevens wrote to his wife Elsie shortly afterward, identifying Duchamp for her as ‘the man who painted The Nude Descending a Staircase’ (L 196). This Francophone setting suited Stevens, as anyone who had read his published work up to that point would have known: his first post-collegiate appearance in print, from August 1914, carried the French title ‘Carnet de Voyage’, while his first major publication, in Poetry later that year, was set in Paris and Belgium, began with a quote from Pascal in the original French and described peace 121

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as a landscape painting by the seventeenth-century French painter Claude Lorrain (misspelled by Stevens as Lorraine; CPP 528). These references suggested more than a facility with the language. Many besides Duchamp were then emphasizing the cultural distance between Old World and New. In fact, certain American artists could have questioned the motives of Duchamp’s comments in the Tribune, given that his triumph at the Armory Show had come, some believed, at the expense of the American artists that show was originally meant to celebrate. The show began as a showcase for the American Association of Painters and Sculptors, and many of its members were dismayed when Walter Pach secured the participation of Duchamp and others and renamed it the International Exhibition of Modern Art. They were then devastated when the European artists received the bulk of the attention and the sales. Jerome Meyers, an American painter, declared that ‘more than ever before our great country had become a colony’ (qtd in Shi 290). Now one of the leading colonists had come to stay. The comment from Meyers takes on an odd resonance when one comes to it by way of ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’, the long poem by Wallace Stevens recounting the journey of a Frenchman who comes to the United States and plans a colony. Nor do I think that parallel is entirely coincidental. As other critics have noted, the journey of Crispin in that poem shares much with the aesthetic journey that Stevens himself took during the 1910s. A significant part of that journey began, I would argue, around the time that Stevens dined with Duchamp in Greenwich Village. Up until that dinner, Stevens had placed himself on the Eurocentric side of the literary and artistic divide. He had referred in his poems to France and Belgium and several other European locales, as well as Babylon, Japan and Java, but he had yet to name in any poem a single American place. In the six years following his dinner with Duchamp, on the other hand, Stevens would refer in his poetry to Tennessee, Oklahoma, Georgia, Connecticut, Florida and the Carolinas, as well as North America, Canada, many Latin American locations and a number of specific American towns. This flood of American place-names reaches its highpoint in ‘The Comedian’, not long after which Stevens took a long hiatus from poetry. In his later career, he continued to use place-names both international and domestic, but without the frequency – and, I would argue, without the same intent – as in this earlier period. One could quite easily discuss this aspect of Stevens’ writing without any reference to Marcel Duchamp.1 But tracing his possible influence in this regard serves, I think, some important purposes. First, it reminds us that national identity is always a largely constructed thing. If America was for Duchamp, as for many French writers before and since, an exotic place, a kind of screen onto which he could project his own interests and ideas, it was not an altogether different kind of thing for Wallace Stevens. Stevens would later acknowledge this explicitly in ‘Description Without Place’, the 1945 poem that so angered William Carlos Williams that he wrote a poem

Stevens, Duchamp and the American ‘ism’

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in response entitled ‘A Place, Any Place, to Transcend All Places’ (see Filreis 182). Williams was upset by the poem because he had thought of Stevens as an ally in his Americanist project – an opinion that derived from the so-called Harmonium years which I will be discussing. In fact, one can find in Stevens’ Americanist poems a marked uncertainty about the project, as I will show. But Williams was not entirely incorrect to see in Stevens some sympathy as well. Which leaves us with a question. Given Stevens’ uncertainty, why did he entertain the Americanist idea? What interest did it hold for him? ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’, which takes as its central drama the establishment of a poetic career, suggests that this uncertain dabbling in Americanism was an attempt to find a poetic identity and establish a foothold in the literary world. It served much the same purpose, in other words, as the other ‘isms’ did for other poets of the period (see Rainey and Menand). Stevens had long before realized he would not make a living from his poetry, but he still wished to ‘make it’ as a poet, as Duchamp had made it as an artist. Stevens was no careerist, of course: he had strict standards as to what would justify a literary career. It is this tension, between finding a place in the literary world and justifying that place, that appears in Stevens’ Americanist poetry, particularly in ‘The Comedian’ and that seemingly inexhaustible, 12-line enigma of a poem, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’. This latter work is a crucial step on the halting, uncertain path that Stevens took in the early stages of his mature poetic career; in what follows, I attempt to retrace the journey to it. The path begins with Duchamp at the Brevoort Hotel, and its next stop is St Paul, Minnesota, where Stevens stayed on the first of many business trips that took him from Hartford and around the country he would soon celebrate in verse.

II Eminent Vers Libriste Arrives in Town Details of Reception. St. Paul, Minn. July 19, 1916. Wallace Stevens, the playwright and barrister, arrived at Union Station, at 10.30 o’clock this morning. Some thirty representatives of the press were not present to greet him. He proceeded on foot to the Hotel St. Paul, where they had no room for him. Thereupon, carrying an umbrella and two mysterious looking bags, he proceeded to Minnesota Club, 4th & Washington-Streets, St. Paul, where he will stay while he is in St. Paul. At the Club, Mr. Stevens took a shower-bath and succeeded in flooding not only the bath-room floor but the bed-room floor as well. He used all the bath-towels in mopping up the mess and was obliged to dry himself with a wash-cloth. From the Club, Mr. Stevens went down-town on business. When asked how he liked St. Paul, Mr. Stevens, borrowing a cigar, said, ‘I like it’. (L 196)

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‘The above clipping may be of interest to you’, Stevens wrote his wife Elsie from St Paul in the summer of 1916, one year after his dinner with Arensberg and Duchamp.2 As is no doubt apparent, the ‘above clipping’ is in fact a parody written by Stevens himself of the kind of publicity sometimes granted to well-known writers travelling to provincial cities. For ‘vers libristes’ such as Stevens, such publicity was on the rise. The entrepreneurial Amy Lowell had spent much of 1915 touring the United States to promote the ‘movement’. In February of 1916, Conrad Aiken complained that poetry was becoming too popular, singling out Poetry magazine and its prize-giving ways for particular complaint (Ellen Williams 178). Harriet Monroe herself worried about poetry’s having become fashionable, while her assistant editor, Alice Corbin Henderson, feared that ‘this supposed popularity of the art’ might be ephemeral: ‘a good deal of dust’ (ibid. 187). The scene in the summer of 1916 was described vividly in The Dial – which had not yet become a purveyor of the ‘new poetry’ – two years later: The Muse was on the make hereabouts: patronesses had been discovering her; prizes were multiplying; newspapers were giving critics their head; poetry magazines, mushrooms or hardier plants were springing up overnight; it was raining anthologies – boom times! (ibid. 239) This comment in The Dial was made apropos of the Spectra hoax, undertaken by Stevens’ Harvard friend Witter Bynner and another Harvard alumnus, Arthur Davison Ficke. ‘Spectrism’ was a send-up primarily of Imagism, but it was the proliferation of ‘isms’ that inspired the parody; the Spectrist method, according to its manifesto, was ‘not so wholly different from the methods of Futurist Painting’ (Smith 8; for the connection between Futurism and Imagism, see Rainey). Bynner and Ficke recognized that these ‘movements’ had taken on a life of their own, and procured for their members an advantage when it came to publication. Louis Menand, making a similar point, has compared the various ‘isms’, and Imagism in particular, to the professional associations that blossomed in the United States late in the nineteenth century. He is not the first to suggest a connection between these movements and professionalization. ‘Just as Taylor and Gilbreth want to introduce scientific management into industry’, wrote Rebecca West in 1913, ‘so the imagistes want to discover the most puissant way of whirling the scattered star dust of words into a new star of passion’ (86). In his satirical Minnesota clipping, Stevens uses two terms for his literary profession: vers libriste and playwright. The first aligns him with the movement that Bynner and Ficke had just begun to parody. (In the original draft of their manifesto, they identified Stevens as a Spectrist. Possibly out of loyalty to Bynner’s friend, they removed this sentence before publication [Smith 74].) The second, meanwhile, draws attention to a portion of his output that has since been largely overlooked. His three mature efforts at poetic drama, one unfinished, received as much attention as most of his


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early poems – more, in fact. Just days before Stevens left for Minnesota, he learned that his first play, Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise, had won a 100dollar prize from Poetry magazine. Stevens was ‘delighted with the result’, calling it a ‘feather in my cap’ (L 194). Contrary to the view that Stevens’ poetic career was unknown to his insurance colleagues, word of this prize apparently circulated among his new co-workers at the Hartford (Brazeau 12). He was extremely accommodating of the criticism provided by Monroe and another judge of the contest, hoping that the play would be successful when performed (L 194–5). The ‘clipping’ from St Paul suggests the excitement with which he regarded his rising literary stature, while its comedy suggests his lingering uncertainty (‘some thirty representatives of the press were not present to greet him’, he notes) and even discomfort (after finding no room in the first hotel, he floods his room in the second). Stevens soon began work on another play. A few days after sending the satirical newspaper clipping, Stevens wrote to his wife again, and described the sights of Minnesota. The ‘way the wind rolled in the grass was better than the Russian ballet’, he wrote, ‘although not unlike it’ (L 196–7). Whether Elsie would have grasped the implications of this sentence is unclear, but the comparison is not, I suspect, made lightly. The Ballet Russes was one of the first triumphs of the ‘new’ art, and it was decidedly international, making its successful Paris debut in 1909, succeeding in London two years later, and eventually winning over New York audiences as well. (Witter Bynner claimed to have first conceived of the Spectra hoax while watching Massine dance in the Spectre de la Rose; Smith 21.) Stevens had observed the grass while sightseeing around St Paul, and in the comment to his wife, he holds up a pastoral, American moment as not only artistically comparable to an eminent example of International Modernism, but as superior to it. A few months later Stevens published for the first time a poem that named an American place. It was a poetic sequence entitled ‘Primordia’, and it begins with another Minnesota scene: All over Minnesota, Cerise sopranos, Walking in the snow, Answer, humming, The male voice of the wind in the dry leaves Of the lake-hollows. For one, The syllables of the gulls and of the crows And of the blue-bird Meet in the name of Jalmar Lillygreen. There is his motion In the flowing of black water. (CPP 534)

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These opening lines flaunt the multiple cultural heritages of America: a Native American place-name is followed by a line comprised of one French and one Italian word, all folded into an English language poem. The sounds of local birds meet somehow in the name of a local person: ‘Jalmar Lillygreen’ is identifiably Minnesotan, given the state’s large population of Scandinavian immigrants (no doubt Stevens particularly enjoyed that anglicized Swedish surname). ‘Lake-hollows’ and snow are also distinctly Minnesotan. Tony Sharpe, one of the few critics to mention ‘Primordia’ at all, calls the sequence a series of ‘regional miniatures’ (27). That description, however, seems to suggest the ‘local colour’ writing of the late nineteenth century rather than the ‘localist’ poetics employed, I think, in this sequence. These poetics differ from earlier ‘local colour’ writing in the conviction that, in the words of William Carlos Williams, ‘the classic is the local fully realised’, that ‘true’ or ‘great’ literature is always local (356).3 The author of ‘Primordia’ not only includes regional details, he implies a relationship between place and poetic voice. The ‘cerise sopranos’ are red birds, figured as female, who answer the ‘male voice of the wind’ – a familiar trope for poetic inspiration. The sounds of the birds are, in turn, expressed by a local person. Thus the place is embodied, and local culture becomes a representation of a natural spirit. The title of the sequence, too, suggests that these local images somehow embody an originary source. It is important to note, I think, the small phrase set off by itself in the seventh line: ‘For one’, the poems says, before introducing Jalmar Lillygreen and the notion that his name embodies his surroundings. This little phrase opens up the possibility of distance between the ideas expressed and the author of them. In this respect it may serve the same purpose as the repeated phrase ‘he said’ in the poem ‘Anecdote of Men by the Thousand’, published a couple of years later and concerned with the same argument.4 That poem says: There are men whose words Are as natural sounds Of their places As the cackle of toucans In the place of toucans. (CPP 41) ‘These are tentative ideas for the purposes of poetry’, Stevens wrote to one correspondent interested in the philosophy of ‘Sunday Morning’ (L 293). This comment returns to my earlier point. Stevens, at this time, was trying to establish himself as a poet. Experimenting with Americanism served that purpose, even if he was unsure of its ultimate persuasiveness. Certainly it was not a coincidence that Stevens submitted ‘Primordia’ to a new journal called The


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Soil, founded by the gallery owner Robert Coady (see Zilczer). The founding editorial of the magazine was devoted to a description of ‘American Art’: It is not a refined granulation nor a delicate disease – it is not an ism. It is not an illustration to a theory, it is an expression of life – a complicated life – American life. The isms have crowded it out of ‘the art world’ and it has grown naturally, healthfully, beautifully. It has grown out of the soil and through the race and will continue to grow. It will grow and mature and add a new unit to art. (Coady 4) Coady’s editorial is highly Whitmanesque, containing long lists of American items, names and places: the automobile, the boxer Jack Johnson, Pittsburgh and Duluth, the Panama Canal. He mentions canonical American writers – Whitman, Poe and Hawthorne – as well as Alfred Stieglitz and Gertrude Stein. In so doing Coady attempts to boost the standing of ‘American Art’ at the expense of its European competition: the ‘refined granulation’ of European Cubism, the ‘delicate disease’ of European aestheticism. These ‘isms’, principally European in origin, were crowding American works out of the market. So American art had to be touted as something different: healthful, natural, ‘of the soil’. In so doing, of course, Coady was promoting his own theory, despite his disavowal of that word. He was, in effect, promoting an American ‘ism’.

III ‘Anyone interested in America’, Marcel Duchamp wrote a few months after ‘Primordia’ appeared, ‘should read The Soil’ (Corn 85). Duchamp knew Robert Coady; it seems possible, even, that he introduced Coady and his magazine to Stevens. Duchamp promoted The Soil in the founding editorial of his own little magazine, The Blind Man, which he founded to accompany the Independents’ Exhibition of 1917. The Independents’ Exhibition was planned by the Society of Independent Artists, a group that included Arensberg and Duchamp among its founding members. They intended the exhibition as a more freewheeling sequel to the Armory Show, alike in scale – and, perhaps, in its ability to shock. Duchamp himself submitted a work that, though not as immediately famous as his Nude, was even more baffling to most who saw it. This new work was not Cubist, however; in keeping with his earlier comments in the Tribune and his more recent support of Robert Coady and The Soil, he had crafted a distinctly American work. Entitled Fountain, it was a common urinal, signed by Duchamp with the pseudonym R. Mutt. The R, Duchamp later explained, stood for Richard, a derogatory French term for an American. He took the last name from Mutt and Jeff, a popular

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American comic strip. Defending the work in The Blind Man, Duchamp wrote: ‘The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges’ (ibid. 49). While Fountain bewildered many, Wallace Stevens was better placed than most to make sense of it. Not only did he know personally all the principals involved in buying, submitting and defending the urinal, he is also likely to have seen Duchamp’s first ready-mades two years before, after his dinner with the artist and Walter Arensberg. When the three men left the Brevoort Hotel, they ‘went up to the Arensberg’s apartment and looked at some of Duchamp’s things’, as Stevens told Elsie in a letter. ‘I made very little of them. But naturally, without sophistication in that direction, and with only a very rudimentary feeling about art, I expect little of myself’ (L 185). Stevens’ use of the word ‘things’ to describe what he saw suggests the difficulty in labelling Duchamp’s ready-mades – the first of which, called ‘Bicycle Wheel’, was crafted in 1913 (Naumann 38–41) – as does his apparent inability to understand what he saw. Four years later, though, he appears to have understood Fountain enough to write a poem about it. That poem comments uncertainly on Americanism, picking up on the tentativeness of ‘Primordia’ and foreshadowing the later difficulties of ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’. It stars another colonist of sorts, and has been called anti-imperialist (Lentricchia 23-5). Whatever its political valence may be, it memorably illustrates the troubles that Stevens had in establishing his place as a poet. Shortly after Fountain was submitted to the Independents’ Exhibition, William Carlos Williams completed the poems for his third collection, Al Que Quiere! He sent copies to a few friends, including Stevens, who noted in response that a ‘book of poems is a damned serious affair’. He had not published a book himself, he explained, because he had a ‘disdain for miscellany’. His ‘own ideas of discipline’, as he called them, included having a fixed point of view and sticking to it: ‘to fidget with points of view leads always to new beginnings and incessant new beginnings lead to sterility. A single manner or mood thoroughly matured and exploited’, he wrote, ‘is that fresh thing’ (qtd in Williams 15). This language of discipline and maturation, of progress, is the language of the post-Romantic literary career, as Edward Said has argued. Every writer, in Said’s words, ‘has an interest in preventing [his or her] work from degenerating into a miscellany of writings, governed successfully by neither personality nor time’ (234–5). And in keeping with a post-Romantic aesthetic, ‘that fresh thing’ is the justification for a literary career. As is clear from his letter to Williams, Stevens felt that his own writing had yet to cohere, and so he could not publish a book – that was a larger step in the progress of a poetic career than his own work merited (or so, at least, he believed; as I said earlier, Stevens was no careerist). Williams responded to Stevens’ letter about his ‘ideas of discipline’ in an essay that appeared in The Little Review in March of 1919.5 The essay surveys


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the state of American art, and Williams presents a disagreement with Stevens: unlike his friend, he believed in loosening, not fixing, his attention, so that his point of view could be challenged by objects in the outside world. He refers, in this context, to Arensberg and Duchamp, noting that some considered Fountain ‘a representative piece of American sculpture’ (10), a description which echoes the defence of the piece published in The Blind Man. That defence not only touted the work as truly representing America, it also touted the new ‘point of view’ it created. ‘He took an ordinary article of life’, it reads, ‘placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object’ (qtd in Corn 49). At just the moment when this essay by Williams appeared, Stevens was compiling a sequence of poems for Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine. Three months later, he sent Monroe three new poems, asking her to substitute them for some he had sent before. Among them was a response to both the essay by Williams and the notorious work by Duchamp: I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. (CPP 60)

Stevens, in this poem, has re-enacted Duchamp’s artistic creation, at least as described in The Blind Man: he has ‘placed’ an ‘ordinary article of life’ in a new setting, so that ‘its useful significance’ has disappeared, and a new ‘point of view’ and ‘thought for that object’ have appeared in its wake. Rather than submit this object to an art exhibition, however, Stevens has placed it in the Tennessee wilderness.6 Why the difference? The goal of Americanism, as articulated by Williams, Coady and, to a lesser extent, Duchamp, was to represent or even embody America. The jar, the work of art, should, like the name of Jalmar Lillygreen, make a sound that is natural to its place. But that is not what happens here. Stevens demonstrates this with a pun. A jar

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is not only an ‘earthen vessel of cylindrical form’ but also a ‘harsh sound’, or ‘discord’. ‘Ajar’, as one word, means both ‘slightly open’, and also ‘out of harmony’.7 The earliest debate about this poem centred on the question of whether Stevens was for the jar or for wilderness (Doyle 228–9). Such a strict dichotomy seems unhelpful. But the clear conflict between the two does suggest that – by the standards of Americanism, at least – the jar in the poem is a failure as a work of art. The jar, like Duchamp’s Fountain, creates a ‘new point of view’; but Stevens believed, as he told William Carlos Williams, that ‘to fidget with points of view’ could ‘lead to sterility’. Stevens believed there was a style that the artist achieved and that that style had an inherent value. Quoting what he believed were representative lines from Williams, he told his friend: ‘A book of that would feed the hungry’ (qtd in Williams 15). The jar in Tennessee, on the other hand, is sterile. It does ‘not give of bird or bush’. It can feed no one. And yet the poem does succeed, even if its titular jar does not. Its homely rhymes and uneven line-lengths seem to echo the homespun image of the jar, and its formal irregularities – particularly the first stanza’s oddly short last line – seem to embody the conflict between the jar and its place in ‘the wilderness’. In her shrewd, careful reading of the poem, Helen Vendler argues that it depicts the ‘thinness’ of the American cultural soil (45–6). But Stevens was not Henry James; he was more inclined toward the Americanist aesthetic espoused by Williams than he was toward the Eurocentric position taken by Eliot and Pound, who self-consciously followed in James’s footsteps. Whether Europe’s cultural soil is any less ‘thin’, then, seems neither here nor there. What matters is that Stevens cannot seem to find a voice that embodies his place, unlike those men whose words are ‘as natural sounds / Of their places / As the cackle of toucans / In the place of toucans’. His voice, as he would discover later, was suited to that gulf between our words and our places. But if this is the lesson of ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, Stevens was slow to learn it. He went on to write ‘From the Journal of Crispin’ two years later, a long poem that explores the Americanist idea more extensively than any he had written to that point. Unlike its revision, ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’, ‘From the Journal of Crispin’ ends confidently, with its poetprotagonist setting out on a newly established literary career, a career very much grounded in the Americanist aesthetic. Why did Stevens move from his jar in Tennessee to the ‘Journal of Crispin’? I suspect that he was unsure, in 1919, whether the failure depicted in ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ was inherent in the project itself, or, rather, in the poet attempting to carry it out. When Stevens sent the poem to Monroe, he asked her to title the sequence ‘Pecksniffiana’, after the unsavoury character described at length in the second chapter of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens. Seth Pecksniff is ‘fuller of virtuous precept than a copy-book’, and is compared to a ‘direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there’ (L 24). Stevens, in his self-deprecating way, may have seen in these lines an indictment of his own


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work. Though he filled his poetry with the names of places, he somehow failed to reach them. It would be two decades before he concluded that ‘we live in a place . . . that is not ourselves / And hard it is, in spite of blazoned days’ (CPP 332).

Notes 1. Others have considered the relationship between Stevens and Duchamp, Glen MacLeod most importantly. However, no one has previously examined their connection within the context of ‘Americanism’. 2. As Holly Stevens notes, the letter is actually from June; Stevens mis-typed the date in his ‘clipping’. 3. Williams later expressed these views more fully in his own little magazine, Contact, which he founded in 1920 and to which Stevens would also contribute. D. H. Lawrence, who focused his 1922 Studies in Classic American Literature on the ‘spirit of place’, admired Williams’ ideas, as is evident in his review of In the American Grain entitled ‘American Heroes’ (Doyle 89–91) and printed originally in the 14 April 1926 issue of The Nation. 4. Lee M. Jenkins suggests, in reference to this poem, that Stevens ‘may have been parodying Williams’ brand of cultural localism back in the twenties’ (178). Jenkins is on the right track, I think, but the distance Stevens places between himself both in ‘Anecdote of Men by the Thousand’ and in ‘Primordia’ does not quite rise to the level of parody. 5. Part II of the essay was published in April; together these essays served as the prologue to Williams’ 1920 collection of ‘improvisations’, Kora in Hell. 6. Further inspiration for this change of setting may have come from Donald Evans’ poem ‘The Jade Vase (Pittsburgh)’, which is collected in Sonnets from the Patagonian, and which Robert Buttel has cited as a possible precursor to ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ (93). 7. These definitions come from the Oxford English Dictionary, which Stevens consulted frequently.

Works cited Brazeau, Peter. Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered; An Oral Biography. New York: Random House, 1983. Buttel, Robert. Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967. Coady, Robert J. ‘American Art’. Soil 1 (December 1916): 3–4. Corn, Wanda M. The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Doyle, Charles, ed. William Carlos Williams: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1980. Filreis, Alan. Wallace Stevens and the Actual World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Jenkins, Lee M. ‘Wallace Stevens and America’. Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry. Ed. Lee M. Jenkins and Alex Davis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 178–98.

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Lentricchia, Frank. Modernist Quartet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. MacLeod, Glen. Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From the Armory Show to Abstract Expressionism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Menand, Louis. Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Naumann, Francis M. New York Dada: 1915–1923. New York: Abrams, 1994. Rainey, Lawrence. ‘The Creation of the Avant-Garde: F. T. Marinetti and Ezra Pound’. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. 10–41. Said, Edward. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books, 1975. Shi, David Emory. Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Sharpe, Tony. Wallace Stevens: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Smith, William Jay. The Spectra Hoax. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961. Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. Vendler, Helen. Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984. West, Rebecca. ‘Imagisme’. The New Freewoman (15 August 1913): 86–7. Williams, Ellen. Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance: The First Ten Years of Poetry, 1912–22. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Williams, William Carlos. ‘Kenneth Burke’. Imaginations. Ed. Webster Scott. New York: New Directions, 1970. 357–9. Williams, William Carlos. ‘Prologue to Kora in Hell’. Reprinted in Poetry in Theory: An Anthology, 1900–2000. Ed. Jon Cook. London: Blackwell Publishers, 2004. 113–14. Zilczer, Judith K. ‘Robert J. Coady, Forgotten Spokesman for Avant-Garde Culture in America’. American Art Review 2.6 (Nov.–Dec. 1975): 77–89.

9 Picasso, Cézanne and Stevens’ Abstract Engagements Edward Ragg

I To consider Stevens’ persistent attention to the idea of things (or places), particularly in a Transatlantic context, naturally raises the vexed question of abstraction. This is not merely because Stevens’ middle career evidences a growing interest in an abstract poetic. It is also because mental conception involves abstracting phenomena and giving that data ‘reality’: a never-ending process of imaginative renewal both for the mind itself and a frequent element in Stevens’ writing. My phrase ‘abstract engagements’ refers, then, to two aspects of Stevens’ work: first, the poet’s tireless grappling with a notion of poetic abstraction and, second, the idea that Stevens’ abstract meditations on people, places – what one poem calls ‘The News and the Weather’ (CPP 237) – are paradoxical connections. For, rather than conceiving Stevens as a victim of his own abstractions, as a poet out of touch with his cherished ‘actual world’ (L 292) – as Marjorie Perloff has argued with reference to Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942) – I suggest Stevens’ own brand of abstraction actually marks the poet’s paradoxical contact with ‘reality’, at the very least its interrogation. In an idealist loop which is hardly solipsistic, Stevens’ meditation on mind and ‘reality’ as poetry is directed by his abstractive spirit. When we think of Stevens in Transatlantic terms, therefore, the poet’s penchant for abstraction must be taken into account. Stevens’ poetic is ‘Transatlantic’ not only because it comprises literary and other artistic influences adapted from American and European cultures. More significantly, his writing strives toward realizations of self and place that travel to and fro simultaneously on an abstract level; such that this Connecticut poet benefits from imaginative travel, eschewing what he dismisses as ‘intellectual tourism’ (L 601). For whilst we might disbelieve, for example, Stevens’ claim that ‘Lugano has been more or less a spot for me this summer’ (L 645), the strength of his imagination is such that he can reflect in compelling ways on places, even cultures, with which he had no immediate contact, as 133

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his relationship with Thomas McGreevy attests (witness the late poem ‘Our Stars Come from Ireland’ which also transmutes the Irishman McGreevy to America). As Alan Filreis argues persuasively in ‘Beyond the Rhetorician’s Touch: Stevens’ Painterly Abstractions’, the complexity of Stevens’ insistence on the influence of French painting on his poetic imagination – particularly in the post-Second World War climate in which American abstract painting gradually gained ascendancy over European art – presents a poet whose abstract tendency marries several cultural forces simultaneously. Stevens is ‘Transatlantic’, then, because of his refusal to define his tastes, indeed his whole poetic, within an American grain or as a modern version of European Romanticism. All the noise about France in the correspondence reveals, as Filreis suggests, not a dependence on what for Emerson were the courtly muses of Europe, but an enticing abstract aesthetic irreducible to national or continental definitions. Of course, Stevens undoubtedly craved ‘the fellowship of one’s own kind . . . the fellowship of the landsman or compatriot’ (L 644). But such ‘fellowship’ need not have been American or even Dutch, despite (and maybe even because of) Stevens’ genealogical investigations. Clearly, his poetry approaches an idea of fellowship over and above defining oneself in Dutch, American, New England or even Pennsylvanian or Connecticut terms. This is not to say place is dormant in Stevens. Rather, the poet’s abstraction enables him to reflect more deeply on poetry’s own miraculous ability to invoke ‘something native and real’ (L 614). As Stevens quipped, seemingly half-way toward writing his own poem: ‘I like natives: people in civilized countries whose only civilization is that of their own land. Not that I have ever met any: it is merely an idea. Yet it would be nice to meet an idea like that driving a donkey cart, stopping to talk about the rain’ (L 613). This is precisely the kind of ‘abstract engagement’ the poet craves. In this chapter I will discuss Stevens’ initial ambivalence toward, then gradual attraction to an abstract aesthetic: an aesthetic change of heart occurring in the mid to late 1930s. Focusing initially on ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ (1937) – a poem that critiques the very abstraction it also embraces – I suggest various contexts for Stevens’ eventual acceptance of abstraction: including the influence of Picasso, but also the example of Stevens’ favourite painter Cézanne. Cézanne’s ‘presence’ in the poems immediately following ‘Blue Guitar’ – particularly in the ‘Canonica’ sequence which would comprise the first twelve poems of Parts of a World (1942) – is significant. However, the discussion here is confined to perhaps its most instructive example, ‘Prelude to Objects’ (1938). I will also characterize the spread of abstraction in Stevens’ oeuvre, taking issue with the historicist claim that the poet becomes actively political during and after the Second World War (this will find me departing slightly from the Filreis of Wallace Stevens and the Actual World only to embrace the emphasis of ‘Beyond the Rhetorician’s Touch’). Specifically, the Stevens who ‘does not have to go to the Louvre’ and yet remains

Picasso, Cézanne and Stevens’ Abstract Engagements

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engagingly cosmopolitan proffers an abstract aesthetic which is all the more human paradoxically because of its refusal to engage the world on conventional terms. Rather than offer sustained readings of these two poems, my intention is to illustrate a definitive moment in Stevens’ development in order to adumbrate the contours of his total career.

II During the mid-1930s abstraction haunted Stevens’ writing. In December 1935 he wrote to Ronald Lane Latimer: ‘[M]y real danger is not didacticism, but abstraction’ (L 302). A rarely quoted part of the ‘Adagia’ (1934–40?) also observes: ‘Abstraction is a part of idealism. It is in this sense that it is ugly’ (OP 187). Faced by the economic and political uncertainties of the mid-1930s, the poet’s faith in philosophical and Romantic idealism was challenged, therefore, by the thought that such forces were greater than the mind’s power to construct ‘reality’, that abstract conception might equal little more than solipsism. ‘Owl’s Clover’ (1936) aimed to achieve a ‘civil fiction’, an artwork faithful both to the demands of poetry and to the reality of the Depression. By marrying civic and poetic aims, Stevens drifted awkwardly, however, toward an aesthetic that would dissolve dualism, particularly any distinction between ‘imagination’ and ‘reality’. What ‘Owl’s Clover’ and ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ demonstrate is Stevens’ unease about a poetic that – whilst it might positively transcend dualism – risked becoming dangerously ‘abstract’. Stevens would later implicitly characterize his responses to the changing geopolitical situation through a preference for ‘abundant poetry’ rather than the nominally ‘pure poetry’ of his early work (L 495). But in the mid-1930s he would ponder the point of achieving this ‘civil fiction’, particularly if that aesthetic itself risked alienation from the world. As ‘Owl’s Clover’ asserts in language reminiscent of the snakeskin shed in ‘Farewell to Florida’ (also 1936): A shade of horror turns The bees to scorpions blackly-barbed, a shade Of fear changes the scorpions to skins Concealed in glittering grass, dank reptile skins. The civil fiction, the calico idea, The Johnsonian composition, abstract man, All are evasions like a repeated phrase, Which, by its repetition, comes to bear A meaning without a meaning. (CPP 586) Such fear of the ‘abstract’ as an ‘evasion’, as something removed from its context – reflected in those shed ‘dank reptile skins’ – worried Stevens because

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he was wary of creating a poetry that risked ‘meaning without meaning’. What the poet could not have known in 1936 was that he was about to write a work which would thrive on the tension of both critiquing abstraction and creating its own abstract space. ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ would achieve this abstract textual locale through the use of ‘repeated phrases’, but these hardly comprised the superficial ‘meaning’ ‘Owl’s Clover’ dismisses. For ‘Blue Guitar’ is neither a poem that reads like a ‘Johnsonian composition’ – which Stevens implies is writing a little too perfect and self-contained – nor does it have any truck exactly with ‘abstract man’ (even canto XXX’s attempt to ‘evolve a man’ seems parodic [CPP 149]). Retrospectively, of course, the poet would distinguish between these poems in the following way: The effect of Owl’s Clover is to emphasize the opposition between things as they are and things imagined; in short, to isolate poetry. . . . The Man with the Blue Guitar . . . deals with the incessant conjunctions between things as they are and things imagined. (CPP 998) But if by ‘isolate’ Stevens means to define poetry as that medium interposing between things imagined and actual, his use of the verb also inadvertently betrays the fear manifest in ‘Owl’s Clover’ that poetry could become isolated, could be an abstract evasion. Stevens was attempting to characterize ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ as a poem that is not abstract in a pejorative sense. It is intimate with the ‘conjunctions’ between imaginative and actual life. In differentiating the poems in this way, however, Stevens was overlooking, consciously or otherwise, the battle within ‘Blue Guitar’ itself between critiquing abstraction and creating a type of abstract verse. Before turning to ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’, however, the specific senses in which Stevens used the word ‘abstract’ from 1935–42, his first abstract phase, should be refined. Before the earlier poems in Parts of a World – such as ‘The Candle a Saint’ (1939) – Stevens’ use of ‘abstract’ is essentially pejorative. Whilst ‘abstract’ primarily means something ‘separated from matter, practice, or particular examples’, its negative connotations include being ‘not concrete’, ‘idealistic, not practical’ or just plain ‘abstruse’ (OED 1./2.). To be ‘abstracted’ is to be ‘withdrawn in thought’ and, as a transitive verb, to ‘abstract’ is to ‘deduct, remove’ or even ‘steal’ something from its original context (OED). As observed already, Stevens fears the abstract in ‘Owl’s Clover’ because it is an ‘evasion’, an aesthetic departure from what the poet in 1935 calls the ‘actual world’. For Stevens, evasions are mental creations akin to ‘Johnsonian compositions’. ‘Johnsonian’ implies ‘using . . . long words of Latin derivation’. Although not a long word, ‘abstract’ is of Latin derivation, from abstrahere meaning ‘to draw away’ (OED). This notion of ‘drawing


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away’ – either in terms of abstracting an object or removing oneself – preoccupied Stevens greatly in the late 1930s and early 1940s as he scrutinized the poet’s role in an increasingly disturbing world. For example, ‘The Irrational Element in Poetry’ insists the poet’s response to ‘the pressure of the contemporaneous’ involves ‘resistance’ but not ‘escape’ (CPP 788). Stevens would defensively transform his 1936 emphasis on ‘resistance’ into a positive form of ‘escapism’ in ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’ (1941): The poetic process is psychologically an escapist process. The chatter about escapism is, to my way of thinking, merely common cant. My own remarks about resisting or evading the pressure of reality mean escapism, if analyzed. Escapism has a pejorative sense which it cannot be supposed that I include in the sense in which I use the word. The pejorative sense applies where the poet is not attached to reality, where the imagination does not adhere to reality, which . . . I regard as fundamental. (CPP 661–2) By 1941, though, Stevens’ sense of abstraction itself resists the charge of escapism (which is why he feels relatively confident about redefining ‘escapism’ in positive terms). By the early 1940s ‘abstraction’ means neither the failure of the poet to ‘adhere to reality’ nor the wilful use of the imagination to distort ‘reality’, but signifies instead a positive creative process in which the idea of poetry inspires the creation of actual poems (just as, a little later, Stevens’ acquisition of largely French paintings that were often representational in nature gave him the ‘ideas’ for abstract poems). Both ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ and ‘The Irrational Element’ confront this phenomenon but are not comfortable calling the process ‘abstract’. In fact, in another letter to Latimer Stevens pointedly defended the ‘Blue Guitar’ cantos against the label ‘abstraction’: ‘They deal with the relation or balance between imagined things and real things which . . . is a constant source of trouble to me. I don’t feel that I have as yet nearly got to the end of the subject. Actually, they are not abstractions, even though what I have just said about them suggests that’ (L 316). The distance between ‘The Noble Rider’ and Stevens’ 1936 lecture, however, marks the poet’s gradual acceptance of an abstract poetic. In 1941 Stevens imagines a ‘possible poet’. The possible poet’s ‘power’ derives from his ability ‘to abstract himself, and to withdraw with him into his abstraction the reality on which the lovers of truth insist’ (CPP 656–7). But Stevens’ positive use of ‘abstract’ becomes clearer if one ceases to use the term tautologically as an explanation of itself. In brief, what is created in the ‘mind’s eye’ has a bearing both on how Stevens wrote his poems and how his readers experience them. For Stevens’ realization in ‘Blue Guitar’ was that ideas about verse,

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although not actual in a concrete sense, can nevertheless be catalysts for creating poetry. One can see Stevens’ awareness of this phenomenon as early as 1936. The close of ‘The Irrational Element in Poetry’ suggests: ‘There is . . . an unwritten rhetoric that is always changing and to which the poet must always be turning. That is the book in which he learns that the desire for literature is the desire for life’ (CPP 790). Nevertheless, in 1936 this ‘unwritten rhetoric’ – or the creative process that conceives it – is not something Stevens is ready to call ‘abstract’. Stevens’ eventual embrace of abstraction obviously involved a ‘resistance’ of sorts to a violent and changing world. However, one upshot of the sympathetic historicist criticism from the last two decades has been a tendency to overemphasize the role Stevens’ poetry plays in responding to political and social issues. For example, although Angus Cleghorn grants Stevens is ‘ideologically elusive’, he sees a poem like ‘Description Without Place’ (1945) as exacting a ‘deconstruction’ of the ‘expansionist rhetoric’ of American foreign policy at the end of the Second World War (24). Likewise, Melita Schaum views the poet as ‘centrally political’, arguing Stevens ‘provides startling insights into the fictions of history, the rhetorical “illusions” by which we as social beings live and act’ (204, 200). Jacqueline Brogan, too, finds Stevens to be a ‘very politically involved poet’ who ‘dismantle[s] false public rhetorics’ (19, 23). Finally, Alan Filreis claims Stevens’ reservations about the New Critics – particularly the vitriol with which Allen Tate responded to the ‘Brooks-MacLeish thesis’ and similar demands for a nationalistic literature in time of war – led the poet to adopt a ‘nationalist’ stance in his 1940s verse and prose (Actual World 80). Yielding to the pressure to answer Perloff’s damning appraisal of the Cummington edition of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, such responses overstate Stevens’ readability as a politically concerned poet which risks sacrificing the difficulty of the poetry to the general position that poems challenge commonsensical perception of the world or ‘reality’. There is, at least, a danger in implying Stevens has an unequivocal agenda as a writer; although this is not obviously to claim that Stevens criticism (particularly Filreis’ pioneering work) has not been enriched by re-examination of the interaction between history, politics and poetry. To see how Stevens criticism has occasionally misrepresented the nature of the poet’s engagements, I will turn briefly to the reception of ‘The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet’ (1943). This lecture usually attracts attention because of Stevens’ insistence on an ‘agreement with reality’ (CPP 676). As Filreis suggests, by 1943 Stevens was keen to replace the imagination-reality equilibrium of ‘The Noble Rider’ with an emphasis on facing ‘reality’ headon (Actual World 28). Understandably, Filreis reads this shift as a reflection of Stevens’ awareness that he would be addressing a ‘refugee audience’ at the Les Entretiens de Pontigny at Mount Holyoke College in August 1943, where his


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paper was chaired by Gestapo survivor Jean Wahl (100). However, ‘The Figure of the Youth’ is not overtly concerned with the social and political reality of Nazi-occupied Europe and certainly not with the specific experiences of the Mount Holyoke refugees. Such a reality undeniably exerts pressure on the lecture, but Stevens’ preoccupations in ‘The Figure of the Youth’ only relate to that pressure in an indirect sense: namely through the freedom represented by the ‘figure of the youth’ who realizes his own imagination. Stevens’ main preoccupation in his 1943 lecture is with sketching the figure of his ‘virile poet’ (what ‘The Noble Rider’ had previously figured as the ‘robust poet’ [CPP 644]). Both the ‘robust poet’ and the ‘he’ who speaks at the end of ‘The Figure of the Youth’ (see CPP 685) are not abstracted from the world in a pejorative sense but aim to re-establish fresh contact with ‘reality’ through imaginative meditation. Clearly, this is a different kind of project from the poetry of social or political engagement. The ‘agreement with reality’ reveals, then, a Stevens who, in the face of global disunity, takes solace in abstraction’s ability to reconfigure life in refreshing ways. Moreover, as Stevens insists, the world in which his youth lives is ‘apart from politics’: There is a life apart from politics. It is this life that the youth as virile poet lives, in a kind of radiant and productive atmosphere. . . . The pleasure that the poet has there is a pleasure of agreement with the radiant and productive world in which he lives. (CPP 678; emphasis added) This was an important statement for Stevens because in 1954 he chose it as the Epilogue to one of the few recordings he made (see Wallace Stevens Reads). What must be stressed is that there is nothing incompatible in insisting on a realm of experience beyond the political sphere whilst also acknowledging that political realities exert a pressure on this ‘life apart’. At least, it can hardly be claimed that the ‘agreement’ Stevens speaks of throughout ‘The Figure of the Youth’ indicates a growing social commitment, or, as Filreis has it, finds Stevens becoming, even unwittingly, a new ‘nationalist’ (Actual World 80). If Stevens urges an ‘agreement with reality’ in his mid-1940s work it is partly to show how an abstract and idealist imagination is not reducible to the political sphere, even if it is influenced by it. The poet – and Stevens – emerges as a ‘spiritual epicure’ who realizes the cost of the freedom in which he can savour a life of the senses (L 394). An abstract aesthetic brings that life of the senses to bear through rejuvenation. It represents a poetic engagement that competes with the trappings of everyday life; but such trappings are also points of access for Stevens, particularly in his last decade, where the ‘ordinary’ and ‘normal’ are given fresh vitality through abstract meditation.1

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III The two most quoted parts of ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ are probably cantos I and XXII. Canto I establishes the dialogue between guitarist and audience which defines the philosophical argument of the poem: The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. They said, ‘You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are.’ The man replied, ‘Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar.’ And they said, then, ‘But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are.’ (CPP 135) Canto XXII specifically identifies poetry as an idea that metaphorically travels between the ‘imagination’ and ‘reality’: Poetry is the subject of the poem, From this the poem issues and To this returns. Between the two, Between issue and return, there is An absence in reality, Things as they are. Or so we say. But are these separate? Is it An absence for the poem, which acquires Its true appearances there, sun’s green, Cloud’s red, earth feeling, sky that thinks? From these it takes. Perhaps it gives, In the universal intercourse. (CPP 144–5) Undeniably, both these cantos are central to understanding the themes of Stevens’ poem. Canto XXII, in particular, spells out the effect of the idea of


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‘poetry’ on the creation of poems themselves. Stevens represents the ‘imagination’ at its most ‘unreal’ creating the catachreses of ‘earth feeling’ and ‘sky that thinks’. These are not flights of fancy but examples of whatever might influence actual poems: ‘From these it takes.’ This is doubtless the essence of what Stevens means in ‘Notes’ by the injunction ‘It Must Be Abstract’ (CPP 329). But in order to arrive confidently at finding a positive ‘absence in reality’, ‘Blue Guitar’ has to collapse the poem’s opening dialogue, which itself raises concern as to the creation of an artistic domain that is removed from plain, old ‘things as they are’. For example, Canto VII ventures a persona-poet who steps in as surrogate guitarist once the poem’s initial dialogue disappears: And shall I then stand in the sun, as now I stand in the moon, and call it good, The immaculate, the merciful good, Detached from us, from things as they are? Not to be part of the sun? To stand Remote and call it merciful? The strings are cold on the blue guitar. (CPP 137–8) Standing ‘remote’ leads to imaginative sterility, represented here by cold guitar strings. There is an obvious fear of being abstracted from the world, standing in the moon and not being ‘part of the sun’. Although Stevens’ ‘I’ associates itself with the guitarist, ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ is not ultimately about a guitarist but is concerned primarily with the figure who speaks in the poem (as if to be ‘with’ the blue guitar is more a matter of imaginative chance than poetic musicianship). The ‘blue guitar’ persists throughout but increasingly lacks its guitarist. Moreover, it is not only the ‘I’ that poses questions about where to ‘stand’. This ‘I’ becomes a speaker the reader cannot locate, a ‘persona’ without a context (if it can be called a persona at all). It is an ‘I’ who becomes an abstract token and creator of meaning, a figure who cannot be detached because it has no context from which to be removed; and it has no context because its location in ‘Blue Guitar’ is continually on the move. This can be seen in Canto XV, where Picasso is ‘introduced’ to the poem: Is this picture of Picasso’s, this ‘hoard Of destructions,’ a picture of ourselves,

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Now, an image of our society? Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg, Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon, Without seeing the harvest or the moon? Things as they are have been destroyed. Have I? Am I a man that is dead At a table on which the food is cold? Is my thought a memory, not alive? Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood And whichever it may be, is it mine? (CPP 141–2) As Glen MacLeod has shown, ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ is highly context-suggestive (see 57–78). However, despite the echoes of Surrealist and Cubist topoi – and despite Stevens’ allusion to a ‘picture of Picasso’s’ – the poem does not yield generously to cross-generic examination. The most useful artefact standing behind Stevens’ text is not a painting but, as MacLeod suggests, the interview Christian Zervos conducted with Picasso in 1935. Stevens’ ‘hoard of destructions’ tropes Picasso’s description of a painting as a ‘sum of destructions’. As the painter explains: ‘A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture – then I destroy it. In the end, though, nothing is lost: the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else’ (qtd in Ashton 8). Of course, ‘Blue Guitar’ is more concerned with self-preservation than destruction, which may account for the poet’s substitution of ‘hoard’ for Picasso’s ‘sum’ (hoarding being to ‘overstock . . . in time of scarcity’ [OED 3.]). But what relation exists between Picasso’s comments on composition and Stevens’ troubled speaker who observes ‘Things as they are have been destroyed. / Have I?’? What is not usually mentioned in comparing ‘Blue Guitar’ with the Zervos interview is Picasso’s overt distaste for ‘abstract art’. It is a distaste that has a bearing on both Picasso’s and Stevens’ ideas about composition. As the painter argues: There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. There’s no danger then, anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark. It is what started the artist off, excited his ideas, and stirred up his emotions. Ideas and emotions will in the end be prisoners in his work . . . They form an integral part of it, even when their presence is no longer discernible. (qtd in Ashton 8)


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A fully abstract art is an impossibility, then, because nothing can ultimately be removed from its context; because the concept or object that initiated the artwork always influences the artist’s composition (‘It is what started the artist off, excited his ideas, and stirred up his emotions’). In Picasso’s case, even if a picture is ‘destroyed’ – and appears at a remove from its original ‘object’ – it draws from the object or idea that inspired its composition. Even in destruction ‘nothing is lost’. Earlier in the interview Picasso explains: When you begin a picture, you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. (qtd in Ashton 9) Clearly, Picasso’s views chime both with Stevens’ claims for ideas as imaginative catalysts and with the poet’s own fear of abstraction. When Stevens writes ‘Poetry is the subject of the poem’ (CPP 144) he does not mean the subject-matter of poetry is necessarily poetry itself, as Julian Symons – who had actually published a shorter version of ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ in Twentieth Century Verse – assumed, coming to the unimpressed conclusion in 1940 that the poet was in fact evading his ‘actual world’ (Symons in Doyle 186–94). Rather, Stevens indicates that the idea of creating a poem, whatever its subject-matter, actuates the poem. To borrow Picasso’s phrase, the idea ‘form[s] an integral part of’ the poem ‘even when [its] presence is no longer discernible’; and even when the ‘original’ objects of inspiration are impalpable ‘ideas and emotions’. Yet if for Picasso ‘abstract art’ is plain impossible, ‘Blue Guitar’ fears the ‘unreality’ afforded by excessive abstraction. ‘A Thought Revolved’ (1936) may observe, ‘The poet . . . / Denies that abstraction is a vice except / To the fatuous’ (CPP 171), but the poem Stevens wrote a year later is genuinely worried about what happens to an ‘I’ who speaks in an abstract space where dualism disappears. ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ swings free from the ‘real’ world from which it projects its imaginative creations because ‘things as they are have been destroyed’. This creates epistemological doubt, where the mysterious locale in which Stevens’ ‘I’ speaks provides few certainties. The statement about the destruction of ‘things as they are’ is the only sentence in canto XV that is not a question. Stevens’ speaker is no surer whether or not Picasso’s painting does comprise ‘an image of our society’ than it is of its own identity, the signifiers of its presence and the nature of those signs: ‘Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood / And whichever it may be, is it mine?’ Moreover, the canto relates such uncertainty explicitly to ‘existing’ in an abstract space: ‘Do I sit, deformed, a

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naked egg / Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon, / Without seeing the harvest or the moon?’ ‘Harvest moon’ is the full moon in September that appears ‘at almost [the] same time for several nights’ (OED); but it is a lunar event without reality for a figure that can see neither the ‘harvest’ nor the ‘moon’. In other words, the ‘imagination’ taken to what Stevens calls (in his glosses on ‘Blue Guitar’) ‘pure irreality’ can only dissemble its creations if it persists in staying apart (L 360). The poet adds: ‘I do not desire to exist apart from our works and the imagination does not desire to exist apart from our works. . . . Imagination has no source except in reality, and ceases to have any value when it departs from reality’ (L 362, 364). For all the difficulty Stevens’ comments involve – particularly as he clings to the reality-imagination terminology ‘Blue Guitar’ symbolically collapses – the fear of existing ‘apart’ and without ‘any value’ permeates the poem. But ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ does create a meaningful locale, even if (and, indeed, because of the fact) its speaker undergoes protean shifts affecting the geography of the poem itself. Despite reviews suggesting flippancy, William Carlos Williams hit the nail on the head by describing ‘Blue Guitar’ as ‘thirty-three virtual lyrics’ (qtd in Doyle 173). Williams was saying not just that these were lyrics in all but name, but that they were imaginative projections of what poetry could be (troping the optical sense of a ‘virtual image’ [OED 1./2.]). Unlike the virtual worlds of computer technology – which are usually visible – Stevens’ inspiration derives from an imagined space for his speaker that is virtual because it is always on the point of creation. Canto IX describes the first person as ‘The maker of a thing yet to be made’; and as the speaker asks: ‘Where / Do I begin and end?’ In writing ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ Stevens became accommodated to a positive version of abstraction. Such a realization is confirmed in how he responds to a painter who had an even greater influence on his work: Cézanne. Reflecting back on the nature of the self explored in ‘Blue Guitar’, Stevens observes in the 1938 poem ‘Prelude to Objects’: If he will be heaven after death, If, while he lives, he hears himself Sounded in music, if the sun, Stormer, is the color of a self As certainly as night is the color Of a self, if, without sentiment, He is what he hears and sees and if, Without pathos, he feels what he hears And sees, being nothing otherwise, Having nothing otherwise, he has not To go to the Louvre to behold himself. (CPP 179)


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Stevens affirms here what Cézanne meant by the statement ‘Nature is on the inside’; a comment Maurice Merleau-Ponty also cites approvingly (164). Like the speaker in ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ who joyfully asserts ‘I am, I speak and move // And things are as I think they are’ (CPP 148) the poem celebrates a ‘self’ who both ‘is what he hears and sees’ and ‘feels what he hears / And sees’ (being and feeling being inextricably linked and, playfully, ‘nothing otherwise’). For all the paintings in ‘the Louvre’, then, Stevens’ ‘self’ needs neither to commune with art nor travel the world to achieve his nature: which is, as we have seen already, very much a mature Stevensian stance, even a paradoxically ‘Transatlantic’ one. But if Stevens appears to swing free from his ‘actual world’ – particularly in stating ‘he has not / To go to the Louvre’ – he is also ironically accentuating Émile Bernard’s recollections of Cézanne’s conversation and aphorisms. For Stevens paints a ‘self’ who is not a solipsist but an aesthetic creator, in the model Cézanne proposes for the artist. Bernard published his description of Cézanne, together with the painter’s aphorisms, in L’Occident in 1904. But Stevens could have come to Cézanne’s views through any number of texts; the aphorisms having a profound influence on Picasso, Braque and the Cubists, as well as Matisse (see Cachin 36). Bernard writes of Cézanne: [H]e made himself a new optics, for his own had been obliterated, swept away by a boundless passion for too many images, print, paintings. He wanted to see too much; his insatiable desire for beauty made him examine the multiform tome of Art too much; henceforth . . . if he now goes to the Louvre . . . it is in view of stripping down appearances[.] (qtd in Cachin 37) In Bernard’s words, although Cézanne still ‘goes to the Louvre’ it is for the purposes of ‘stripping down appearances’; an aim Stevens obviously shares with the painter in ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ and the initial function of Stevensian abstraction.2 Cézanne was, in fact, keener on communing with Nature than sitting in the Louvre. Writing to Bernard he observed: The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read. We should not, however, content ourselves with retaining the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let’s take leave of them to study beautiful nature, let’s understand to disengage our minds from them, let’s seek to express ourselves in accordance with our personal temperaments. (qtd in Cachin 18) What made Cézanne revolutionary was just this insistence on personal temperament. Of the 20 aphorisms Bernard recorded, several illustrate Cézanne’s conviction that the artist does not copy nature: he reveals his perception of

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it. As Aphorism 4 insists: ‘Painting after nature is not copying the objective, it’s realizing our sensations’ (qtd in Cachin 37). This does not mean the artist occupies his work, however (a point Bernard was quick to observe in his portrait of Cézanne): [T]he more the artist works, the more removed is the result from his objective, the more he distances himself from the opacity of the model serving as his point of departure, the more he enters into a painting without adornment whose sole aim is itself. The more he abstracts his painting, the more he gives it a simplified amplitude. (qtd in Cachin 37) In effect, the artist reveals his ‘personality’ through painting but not his individuality. As Cézanne himself noted in a letter to Bernard: ‘The thesis to develop . . . is to give the image of what we see, forgetting everything that appears in front of us. Which, I think, should permit the artist to give all of his personality, large or small’ (qtd in Cachin 17–18). Both Cézanne and Stevens imagine ‘personalities’ who do not need to go to the Louvre to behold themselves. Anchored in nature, these idealist figures reveal their perception of the world through the ‘personality’ of art. They forget ‘everything that appears in front’ of them not because the world is bereft of physical reality but because in a world of appearances perception matters. As Proust’s ‘Marcel’ observes: ‘The only real journey . . . would be to travel not towards new landscapes, but with new eyes’ (237). Cézanne’s ‘new optics’ conveys precisely the kind of ‘personality’ that embodies novel vision. Likewise, in the late 1930s Stevens creates a first-person speaker who had definite ‘personality’, but could never be confused with the poet himself. In 1937 Stevens copied extracts from Graham Bell’s comments on Cézanne in New Statesman and Nation into his commonplace book. Citing Bell’s view that ‘Cézanne’s peculiar determination [is] to pin down his sensation’ Stevens added his own annotation: I note the above both for itself and because it adds . . . the thing that is incessantly overlooked: the artist, the presence of the determining personality. Without that reality no amount of other things matters much. (SPBS 53, 55) Here Stevens’ ‘personality’ follows Cézanne’s sense of the term closely. Cézanne is exemplary for Stevens because he exudes personality without falling into solipsism or imaginative indulgence. But Cézanne also becomes in Stevens’ mind the exemplar of the abstract aesthetic the poet turns toward in the late 1930s. Stevens would have known how the term ‘abstraction’ followed Cézanne’s career. As late as 1945 Lionello Venturi applauded the painter for his abstract style: [He] could so abstract his style of form and color and from any given experience of nature and yet convey through his abstractions so profound


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an interpretation of the nature of things, that every artist and also many laymen have in the last forty years seen nature with the eyes of Cézanne himself. (179) Venturi marvels at the painter’s ‘new optics’. This phenomenon enables seeing through ‘the eyes of Cézanne himself’ but without the intrusion of the painter’s individual struggle to create his art. For Stevens, such vision constitutes the gift of a ‘determining personality’. Indeed, Stevens’ ‘self’ does not need to go to the Louvre because – as with Cézanne’s view that ‘Nature is on the inside’ – his palette already comprises himself interacting with the world. ‘Prelude to Objects’ shows, then, a self untroubled by epistemological doubt. Self-knowledge and knowledge of the world are coterminous in the poem, as they are in the person; indeed, Stevens will later combine poet and poem in a similar fashion (hardly adhering to the New Critics’ strict separation of the two).3 Stevens also takes up a verbal paintbrush. Another reason the self does not need to ‘go to the Louvre’ is not because it rejects what Bernard calls the ‘tome of Art’. The reason is that ‘reality’ is conditioned through ‘the eyes of Cézanne himself’: that is, our vision is influenced by art and the personalities who determine that vision; a position that holds good whether you stand in Connecticut or, like Stevens’ correspondent Leonard van Geyzel, in Ceylon. As Stevens insisted in 1938: ‘Cézanne has been the source of all painting of any interest during the last 20 years.’4 Accordingly, even if one steps into the Louvre, one sees more than pictures on the wall. The world itself is revealed through artistic creation, a revelation that for Stevens equals self-revelation: Granted each picture is a glass, That the walls are mirrors multiplied, That the marbles are gluey pastiches, the stairs The sweep of an impossible elegance, And the notorious views from the windows Wax wasted, monarchies beyond The S.S. Normandie, granted One is always seeing and feeling oneself, That’s not by chance. (CPP 179–80) This idealist confection of painting (‘each picture’), reflection (‘glass’, ‘mirrors multiplied’) and metamorphosis (the ‘marbles’ becoming ‘gluey pastiches’, the world beyond the Louvre a ‘wax’ work) marks the inescapable fact that one ‘is always seeing and feeling oneself’. There is, in this sense, no prelude to objects. The ‘prelude’ is certainly not the ‘self’ who views the objects. It is a playful title because a radical idealist aesthetic privileges neither the

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self who manipulates objects nor the objects themselves because it denies the dualism that keeps subject and object apart. In the absence of that distinction there can be no prelude which privileges either the perceiver or the perceived. But Stevens does offer a ‘determining personality’ of his own. As ‘Prelude to Objects’ asserts: ‘It comes to this: / That the guerilla I should be booked / And bound’ (CPP 180). This ‘guerilla I’ is an assailant operating beyond conventional practice: a first person specializing in ‘irregular fighting’ (OED) and a tantalizingly abstract figure in Stevens’ 1930s and 1940s verse. But what might Stevens’ turn to abstraction signal for the corpus as a whole? I want to avoid, of course, suggesting abstraction is the bedrock of Stevens’ writing. Not only would this be an inappropriate metaphor for so fluid a concept, its use would suggest overly capitulating to the seductiveness of Stevensian rhetoric (whereas at least Cézanne provides an alternative language). But when the poet noted to Latimer he had not ‘as yet nearly got to the end of the subject’ he could not have been more correct. By 1938 the ‘abstract’ had a hold on Stevens that would far outweigh the allure of his ‘imagination-reality complex’. It was a form of imagination that helped create the terms of the poet’s specialist vocabulary; but it would outlive Stevens’ more explicit ‘figure[s] of capable imagination’ (CPP 226), not least in the poetry written after 1945. Delmore Schwartz, in his 1938 review of ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’, observed: ‘There is always an abstractness present; everything is turned into an object of the imagination’. Schwartz correctly saw that, as a result, Stevens was in danger of being labelled ‘“too poetic”’. But the scare quotes of Schwartz’s review indicate that he saw salvation for the poet. Stevens’ work is ‘located . . . in the middle of everything which concerns us’, a position paradoxically established through the very abstract quality of Stevens’ verse (Schwartz 52). The poet’s mature realization of the aesthetic initiated in ‘Blue Guitar’ would capitalize not merely on the influences of both Picasso and Cézanne: Stevens’ reading of Henri Focillon (in 1942) and his gravitating toward Maurice Blanchot and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (in the 1950s) gave him not so much support for what was by then an ingrained reflex, but a stimulation akin to the enjoyment he took in imagining faraway places through the correspondence of friends. The turn to abstraction, then, involved pivoting on the potential that might produce a compelling poem rather than arriving at an aesthetic destination. After all, as Stevens notes: The abstract does not exist, but it is certainly as immanent: that is to say, the fictive abstract is as immanent in the mind of the poet, as the idea of God is immanent in the mind of the theologian. The poem is a struggle with the inaccessibility of the abstract. (L 434)


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What we find in late Stevens is not just a poet who makes a virtue of abstraction, but one who derives ‘ideas’ for an abstract poetry from paintings. As Filreis argues in ‘Beyond the Rhetorician’s Touch’, Stevens transformed the largely representational French paintings he purchased into abstract poems rather than identify himself with the American abstract painting gathering pace in the poet’s last decade. He did so, in part, because Picasso and Cézanne had enabled him to think through the limits and powers of abstraction. As Filreis argues, Stevens was not opposed to the new abstraction in American painting. Assuming he saw it at all, it was simply hard for Stevens to plunder that work with his own abstract spirit; or, unlike Klee and Mondrian (even although their works were then exhibited in America), perhaps the new American painting was just too close to home. A French painting bought purely on the suggestion and descriptions of Paule Vidal (and her father Anatole before her) was something Stevens could relish at first in the abstract; but, once arrived in Connecticut, its physical reality was something Stevens would make abstract again not merely so he could return to the same painting with fresh eyes, but for the purposes of creating abstract poetry. Here we discover several forms of engagement in which a ‘Transatlantic Stevens’ keeps his home-world in Hartford imaginatively rejuvenated. In the well-documented case of the Tal-Coat painting that would eventually ‘become’ the poem ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans’, Stevens oscillated between disappointment (‘Tal Coat is supposed to be a man of violence but one soon becomes accustomed to the present picture’ [L 649]) and curiosity: ‘This man [Tal-Coat] puts up a great deal of resistance to the effort to penetrate him. . . . A violent still life sounds like a queer thing. Yet I suppose the thing is violent’ (L 652). The creative violence with which Stevens repeatedly renewed the world about him finds its source in just this kind of abstract effort: to make Tal-Coat into the painter that will almost satisfy Stevens’ incessant longing for a vibrant ‘reality’. It is this type of imaginative engagement, finally, that characterizes the best poems of Stevens’ late career and it is in a spirit of positive abstraction that his late work should be understood.5

Notes 1. See ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ and ‘A Quiet Normal Life’ (1954?), CPP 397 ff., 443–4 and L 459, 521, 643. 2. See Stevens’ desire to ‘think about the world without its varnish and dirt’ (L 427), to become, as ‘Notes’ urges, a thinker of ‘the first idea’ (CPP 330–1). 3. Although Stevens acknowledged that ‘the critic is under obligation to base his remarks on what he has before him’, he was adamant that poet and poem could never be wrest apart: ‘the thing and its double always go together’ (L 346, 354).

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4. Stevens to Wilson E. Taylor, 31 March 1938, The Wallace Stevens Archive, The Huntington Library, WAS 3853. 5. The scholar who most closely follows the human sense of abstraction I have outlined throughout is Charles Altieri. In his Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry Altieri contextualizes where Stevens derives influence and departs from the various types of abstraction found in modern art. What Altieri senses in positive abstraction – and in Stevens in particular – is ‘the enactment of something in our lives and our metaphors deeply enough embedded to take form despite the demise of particular beliefs’ (334).

Works cited Altieri, Charles. Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Ashton, Dore, ed. Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views. New York: Viking, 1972. Brogan, Jacqueline. ‘Wrestling with Those “Rotted Names”: Wallace Stevens’ and Adrienne Rich’s “Revolutionary Poetics”’. The Wallace Stevens Journal 25.1 (Spring 2001): 19–39. Cachin, Françoise et al. Cézanne. New York: Abrams, 1996. Cleghorn, Angus J. Wallace Stevens’ Poetics: The Neglected Rhetoric. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Doyle, Charles. Wallace Stevens: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1985. Filreis, Alan. Wallace Stevens and the Actual World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Filreis, Alan. ‘ “Beyond the Rhetorician’s Touch”: Stevens’ Painterly Abstractions’. American Literary History 4.2 (Spring 1992): 230–63. MacLeod, Glen. Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From the Armory Show to Abstract Expressionism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Primacy of Perception And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Ed. James M. Edie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Perloff, Marjorie. ‘Revolving in Crystal: The Supreme Fiction and the Impasse of Modernist Lyric’. Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism. Ed. Albert Gelpi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 41–64. Proust, Marcel. The Prisoner and The Fugitive. Trans. Carol Clark and Peter Collier. London: Penguin, 2003. Schaum, Melita. ‘Lyric Resistance: Views of the Political in the Poetics of Wallace Stevens and H.D.’. The Wallace Stevens Journal 13.2 (Fall 1989): 191–205. Schwartz, Delmore. Review of The Man with the Blue Guitar. Partisan Review 4.3 (Feb. 1938): 49–52. Stevens, Wallace. ‘Canonica’. The Southern Review 4.2 (Autumn 1938): 382–95. Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966. Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous. Ed. Milton J. Bates. New York: Knopf, 1989. Stevens, Wallace. Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects: Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace Book. Ed. Milton J. Bates. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. Stevens, Wallace. Wallace Stevens Reads. New York: Caedmon, [1956] 1998. [audiotape] Venturi, Lionello. Painting and Painters: How to Look at a Picture, from Giotto to Chagall. New York: Scribner’s, 1945.

10 Music and the Vocal Poetics of Stevens and Valéry Lisa Goldfarb

I In his 1951 acceptance speech ‘On Receiving the Gold Medal from the Poetry Society of America’ Wallace Stevens said of poetry: ‘In one direction it moves toward the ultimate things of pure poetry; in the other it speaks to great numbers of people of themselves, making extraordinary texts and memorable music out of what they feel and know. In both cases it makes itself manifest in a kind of speech that comes from secrecy. Its position is always an inner position, never certain, never fixed’ (CPP 834). In these few words, Stevens synthesizes some of his ideas about poetry and at the same time echoes Paul Valéry. Both assert that a poem occurs in the act of speech and, as we speak the words, we at once give voice to the poet’s own sense and express what Stevens calls elsewhere more broadly ‘the rhythms and tones of human feeling’ (CPP 877). Most importantly, for Stevens and Valéry, the ‘position’ of poetry is ‘never fixed’. Poetry moves, Valéry writes, as a pendulum, steadily and surely from one pole of language to the other – from sound to sense and from expression to impression,1 the ideas in poetry are always to be found in motion, in ‘les coulisses du poème’ (‘the wings of the poem’ [Cahiers I 292]). The parallels between Stevens and Valéry are many: both have abstract casts of mind and famously concern themselves with the crossings and tensions between philosophy and poetry; both consider the precarious place of poetry in the modern world and seek to elevate it to what Stevens calls ‘one of the major significances of life’ (CPP 845); both think carefully about the poetic process in itself and in poetry’s relation to the other arts. While many scholars have discussed similarities between the two – noting, as Harold Bloom does, a philosophical correspondence between them or, as Anna Balakian indicates, Stevens’ general kinship with Symbolist notions of the role of the poet – little work has been done to uncover the deeper, more sustained affinities between these two great twentieth-century poets.2 That a subject of such promise has been so largely untapped is, in part, due to the fuller attention earlier critics 151

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paid to comparative studies of Stevens and Mallarmé and the often inexact pairing of Valéry with his Symbolist predecessor (Benamou 145-6). Stevens, however, does differentiate between the two, and his letters demonstrate that while his reading of Valéry may not have been systematic, Valéry engaged Stevens’ interest over a period of 20 years. In the 1950s, Stevens even devoted substantial time to reading Valéry and, from December to March of his last year, undertook the writing of prefaces to two of Valéry’s dialogues, a project which, as he wrote in a letter to Peter H. Lee, ‘require[d] serious effort’ (L 856). In the current climate where interest in the transnational and interdisciplinary runs so high, Stevens’ readers are ever more conscious of his passion for French as well as other arts. It is therefore crucial that we revisit the subject of Stevens in relation to Valéry and at long last examine what has been overlooked. To that end, this chapter will focus on one aspect of the larger project in which I have been engaged, which is to show how Stevens’ ideas of music echo Valéry’s musical theory and, further, how Stevens enacts the musical theory that they have in common.3 Because this is a subject that manifests itself in a variety of ways, I will confine myself here to the subject with which I began: the musicality of poetic speech. The structure of this chapter will be threefold. First, I will lay out the contours of Valéry’s vocal poetics and then turn to echoes of some of these ideas in Stevens’ prose. Finally, I will discuss a number of Stevens’ poems – among them ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, ‘Variations on a Summer Day’ and ‘The Creations of Sound’ – to demonstrate how Stevens breathes life into their shared poetics of voice.

II Valéry often writes enviously of music for its clarity of system and rues the difficult task of the poet who must carve a poetic language out of the material of ordinary discourse, yet he also uses music to delve into the nature of poetry which he maintains is, in large part, a musical art. Both music and poetry, Valéry writes, are auditory arts, and address themselves to our sense of hearing to which he refers as ‘le sens par excellence de l’attente et de l’attention’ (‘the sense par excellence of expectation and attention’ [Œuvres I 1369]). Poetry, Valéry believes, is the more complex of the two in that it bears relation to pure sound, on the one hand, and thought, on the other. Poetic meaning is evident neither in thought nor music alone: rather, he suggests that thought and music are so tightly bound in poetry that we can only access the kind of meaning particular to poetry by grasping the rhythmic and ongoing motion between the two. Like music, poetry’s nature is essentially active; to approach the meaning of a poem, which is so embedded in its musical-poetic form, we should re-read or, better, listen to its words once again. He writes that ‘une œuvre doit inspirer le désir de la reprendre, de s’en redire les vers, de les porter en soi pour un usage intérieur indéfini’ (‘a work must inspire in us the desire

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to take it up again, to repeat the verses to ourselves, to carry them within for an interior and indefinite purpose’ [Œuvres I 453]). Much of Valéry’s thinking about voice in poetry grows out of his belief in poetry’s intrinsic musicality and an understanding of the poem as ‘act’.4 A poem offers us the possibility of understanding not a fixed idea, but the motion of the poet’s mind and the turns of his sensibility. Importantly, it is in the poem’s voice – the way the poet urges us to speak – that Valéry cultivates his notion of the poem as a dynamic and ongoing process. When he discusses the musical side of his pendulum, he refers to the physical or formal properties of poetic language as ‘la Voix en action’ (‘the Voice in action’ [Œuvres I 1332]). For it is through the voice that the poet addresses the reader and to which the reader attentively listens. In his essay, ‘Première leçon au cours de poétique’ (‘First Lesson in Poetics’), he eloquently accentuates the centrality of voice: Un poème sur le papier n’est rien qu’une écriture soumise à tout ce qu’on peut faire d’une écriture. Mais parmi toutes ses possibilités, il en est une, et une seule, qui place enfin ce texte dans les conditions où il prendra force et forme d’action. Un poème est un discours qui exige et qui entraîne une liaison continuée entre la voix qui est et la voix qui vient et qui doit venir. Et cette voix doit être telle qu’elle s’impose, et qu’elle excite l’état affectif dont le texte soit l’unique expression verbale. Ôtez la voix et la voix qu’il faut, tout devient arbitraire. Le poème se change en une suite de signes qui ne sont liés que pour être matériellement tracés les uns après les autres. (Œuvres I 1349) (A poem on paper is nothing but a piece of writing that has undergone everything that one can do with a piece of writing. But among all its possibilities, there is one, and one only, that ultimately creates the conditions whereby it will assume the greatest form of action. A poem is a discourse that demands and sustains a continuous liaison between the voice that is, the voice that comes and the voice that must come. And this voice must arise and excite the affective state of which the text is the only verbal expression. Remove the voice and the voice that must be, and everything becomes arbitrary. The poem is reduced to a series of signs only linked by the material traces they leave one after the other.) Because he believes that the poem happens in the act of speaking and in the exchange between the poet who speaks and the reader who listens, Valéry pays a great deal of attention to the question of how the poet might nurture a nuanced poetic voice, one that signals to the reader a clear departure from the tones of ordinary speech. His own close attention to poetic form is largely due to his sense that the poet must heighten the physicality of poetic

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language to enhance the voice of a poem. By such emphasis on form, he maintains, the poet urges us to focus on how we speak a poem, for ‘C’est l’exécution du poème qui est le poème’ (‘It is the execution of the poem that is the poem’ [Œuvres I 1350]). One of the most striking aspects of Valéry’s thinking about voice is the way his theory dovetails with ideas about poetic performance. A poetic text, Valéry writes, is an invitation to be realized; it is ‘une écriture qui attend, une loi qui ne vit que sur quelque bouche humaine’ (‘a text which awaits, a law that only lives through some human mouth’ [Œuvres II 1255]), and he tries to set forth guidelines about how to give voice to it. To preserve the musical essence of poems, he suggests that the starting point of poetic speech should never be that of ordinary discourse; rather, the reader should begin his recitation with song as the starting point and then locate a slightly less vibrating tone. Valéry advises the speaker ‘qu’il faudrait se fonder sur le chant, se mettre dans l’état du chanteur, accommoder sa voix à la plénitude du son musical, et de là redescendre jusqu’à l’état un peu moins vibrant qui convient aux vers’ (‘that one must begin with song as one’s starting point, to put oneself in the state of the singer, place one’s voice in the fullness of musical sound, and from there redescend to a slightly less vibrating state appropriate to verse’ [Œuvres II 1256]). Where exactly in a singer’s or speaker’s range this slightly less musical sound lies remains a perplexing issue, yet Valéry tries to articulate its location. He cautions that to speak a poem, one must be mindful of poetry’s delicate relation to music and discourse, adjusting one’s voice somewhere in between the two. He thus suggests that a speaker must constantly search for a balance between the poles of language, and offers us a visual image: ‘Elle n’ose sonner trop haut, ni parler trop net. Elle ne hante ni les sommets, ni les abîmes de la voix. Elle se contente de ses collines et d’un profil très modéré’ (‘The voice of poetry dares not sound too elevated, nor speaks too plainly. It haunts neither the peaks nor the depths of the voice. It is content with its hills and a very moderate profile’ [Œuvres II 1260]). Valéry describes his ideal poetic voice as one that is more ‘restreinte et tempérée’ (‘restrained and tempered’ [Œuvres II 1260]) than a purely musical voice, yet more cadenced than the one we are accustomed to using. That he has considered the texture of this voice carefully is evident in his own descriptive language when he refers to the voice of his ideal reader as a ‘voix savante, vivante, bien plus consciente, plus nette dans ses attaques, plus riche dans ses sonorités, plus attentive aux temps et aux silences, plus marquée dans les changements de ton, que la voix ordinairement prêtée aux œuvres versifiées’ (‘a wise voice, living, much more conscious, clearer in its attacks, richer in its sonority, more attentive to timing and to silences, more marked in its tonal shifts than the voice we ordinarily lend to works in verse’ [Œuvres II 1260–1]). While Valéry sometimes bemoans the place of poetry, resting as it does in such fragile balance, he also insists that it is precisely poetry’s ambiguity that makes for its beauty. Much of his prose is marked by his search for a theoretical


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language that would render the poetic voice more exact in its expressiveness. He works to create a vocabulary that would enable poets – not least himself – to more consciously craft a poetic voice attuned to the active nature of his art. Again we can see in the language that he forges his characteristic emphasis on poetic musicality. Among the terms that Valéry uses to describe the poetic voice, ‘modulation’ is the one on which he depends most heavily. An essential musical principle, Valéry admires the way modulation, the shifting from key to key in a musical piece, enables the composer to express subtle changes in emotional states. He wishes for the poet to be able to similarly modulate the vocal tone in poetry, and works to transpose musical modulation to a poetic context, to ‘Trouver les modulations bonnes pour unir dans le même ouvrage les différentes activités – styles – moments d’un esprit – le mien’ (‘To find modulations fine enough to unite in the same work different activities – styles – moments of the mind – mine’ [Cahiers I 235]). At the same time that Valéry’s poetic modulation gives expression to interior emotional movement, it likewise enables the poet to figure forth changes in exterior perception. For Valéry, a modulating poetic voice would thus mediate the relation between interior and exterior worlds in all their motion. He extends the musical concept to a poetic principle when he writes in one notebook entry: ‘Il y a une science et un art de passer d’une manière de voir à une autre . . . Il y a une modulation’ (‘There is a science and an art of passing from one way of seeing to the next . . . There is modulation’ [Cahiers I 629]). Other words he employs also suggest the vocal underpinning of Valéry’s poetic as well as the active exchange between poet and reader that lies at the heart of the poetic process. ‘[M]ots-musique’ or resonant words (Cahiers I 516) operate much as particular instruments do in an orchestra; each time the reader or listener hears a given word repeated, the word becomes progressively more detached from its representational context and accrues a value intrinsic to the poem itself. As the reader listens to the poem’s resonant language, he becomes more engaged with the movement of the poem. The ‘bouche-oreille de l’esprit’ (‘the mouth-ear of the mind’ [Cahiers I 286]), his discussions of ‘dialogue’ – ‘(DR) (demande-réponse)’ (‘(QA) (question-answer)’ [Cahiers I 300]) – and ‘idéo-verbales’ (‘verbal ideas’ [Cahiers I 298]), indicate that while the voice for which the poet searches arises from his own interior questionings and sense of sound and utterance, the poem still rests on a dialogic premiss. Similarly, Valéry’s call for signs in poetry that indicate speed – ‘Signes de vitesse, de fortement articulé – des arrêts de différente durée’ (‘signs that indicate velocity, signs that indicate strongly accented sounds – stops or pauses of different durations’ [Cahiers I 474]) – would all provide a clearer direction to the speaker as he lends his voice to the poet’s words. Valéry marshals such a vocabulary, in turn, when he refers to his own ‘rêve de poète’ (‘poet’s dream’) which is ‘composer un discours, – une parole de modulations et de relations internes’ (‘to compose a discourse, – a language of modulations and of internal relations’ [Cahiers I 293]). He then elaborates: ‘Pour moi – ce

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serait – l’Être vivant ET pensant . . . sur la corde de la voix’ (‘For me this would be a living AND thinking Being . . . on the vocal chord’ [Cahiers I 293]). While this dream is clearly Valéry’s own, it also seems to summon other poets, particularly Stevens, whose poetics recall Valéry’s active formulation of the poetic process and whose poems demonstrate a virtuosic play of voice and variation.

III In ‘Adagia’, Stevens writes that ‘Words are the only melodeon’ (CPP 909) and ‘The tongue is an eye’ (CPP 907), and he echoes Paul Valéry, if at first faintly. He reveals a playful attitude towards words, an attitude that suggests that poets transform words in poetry into what Valéry calls ‘mots-musique’ (Cahiers I 516), resonant words that assume their place in an entirely different scale than in prose. And when we speak them, with the ‘tongue’, we see the world freshly, much as Valéry hopes that when the poet modulates his tone, we move from one way of seeing to the next. When Stevens initially dismisses the traditional music of poetry, calling it ‘old hat’, he speaks in contrast to Valéry, who consistently exalts conventional form for the way it amplifies the poetic voice (CPP 719). However, as Stevens considers T. S. Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, he reflects on the change from the music of traditional poetry to that exemplified by Eliot’s verse, and insists that ‘the music of poetry has not come to an end’ (ibid.). Like Valéry, he asserts that it is in the cultivation of the voice where the poet preserves poetry’s musical essence: Yet the passage from Eliot was musical. It is simply that there has been a change in the nature of what we mean by music. It is like the change from Haydn to a voice intoning. It is like the voice of an actor reciting or declaiming or of some other figure concealed, so that we cannot identify him, who speaks with a measured voice which is often disturbed by his feeling for what he says. There is no accompaniment. If occasionally the poet touches the triangle or one of the cymbals, he does it only because he feels like doing it. Instead of a musician, we have an orator whose speech sometimes resembles music. (CPP 720) If the voice of Stevens’ modern poetry issues less from conventional poetic form than Valéry’s, it is no less crucial to his understanding of poetic music.5 Like Valéry, Stevens stresses the active exchange between poet and reader and, importantly, preserves the distinction between poetic and ordinary speech. The presence of a listener is implicit throughout – as we listen, we try to identify the speaker of the poem, and we are attentive to his expression of feeling and his occasional use of traditional musical flourish. But it is in the way that Stevens discusses the voice itself where we hear the sharpest Valéryan echo.


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Much like Valéry’s voice, poised in an uneasy balance between discourse and music, Stevens insists that the voice to which we listen in poetry is not the voice of ordinary speech. To emphasize the difference, Stevens asserts: ‘It is like the voice of an actor’; unlike an ordinary speaking voice, the actor is ‘reciting or declaiming’. To further distinguish between discursive and poetic language, Stevens insists on the hidden identity of the poetic voice; it is the voice of a ‘figure concealed’. Stevens infers that if, as listeners, we do not know the identity of the speaker, we listen that much more closely to his articulation of feeling. In his use of the word ‘measured’, Stevens echoes Valéry’s notion of the balance between music and discourse that the poet must strike. Stevens again addresses the question of the poetic voice and its relation to meaning in his essay ‘Two or Three Ideas’ and recalls Valéry in the process. It is no accident that he frames this multifaceted essay, in which he considers style, repetition and poetic meaning, with a reading of the first few lines of Baudelaire’s ‘La vie antérieure’ (‘Former Life’). Stevens gently suggests to the reader that we think about style in relation to the voice to which we listen in Baudelaire’s poem – the voice by which ‘we are suddenly and profoundly touched’ (CPP 839). Valéryan questions haunt this essay: How does the poet move us? What language does he use? What characterizes the voice that so touches us and carries us to a different level of perception? What kind of meaning does the poet convey and how does he convey it? Central to Stevens’ answers to these questions is his understanding of style and its relation to the substance or meaning of a poem. He asserts that in poetry there is no distinction between the two: Style is not something applied. It is something inherent, something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress. It may be said to be a voice that is inevitable. (CPP 845) Stevens emphasizes how style and substance are bound in poetry in his use of the word ‘voice’; the voice sets forth the poet’s own expression and is the form within which it is contained. While Stevens, in ‘Effects of Analogy’, brushes aside conventional form, here in his understanding of the bond between style and voice he echoes Valéry’s discussion. For both poets, the manner of presentation – its form or style – is synonymous with its voice. From its form issues, for Valéry, ‘la voix qui est et la voix qui vient et qui doit venir’ (‘the voice that is, the voice that comes and the voice that must come’ [Œuvres I 1349]) and from its style issues, for Stevens, ‘a voice that is inevitable’. Stevens would certainly have endorsed Valéry’s contention that ‘Ôtez la voix et la voix qu’il faut, tout devient arbitraire’ (‘Remove the voice and the voice that must be, and everything becomes arbitrary’ [ibid.]).

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What is most compelling about looking at Stevens’ and Valéry’s thought side by side is the way their shared vocal poetics leads them to practise poetry with performance in mind. While Stevens does not, like Valéry, address performance directly nor develop in his prose the theoretical vocabulary that we saw earlier in Valéry’s, his intermittent references to questions of diction and experimentation reveal an underlying interest in how the poet might urge the reader to speak the words of poetry. In ‘The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet’, for instance, when he discusses that poetry comes, if indirectly, from ‘the personality of the poet’, he writes of poetic language, ‘it is not an attainable acme, not some breath from an altitude’ (CPP 670), and recalls Valéry’s assertion that the speaking voice inhabits ‘ni les sommets, ni les abîmes de la voix’ (‘neither the peaks nor the depths of the voice’ [Œuvres II 1260]). He returns to the concept of the poet as quasi-musical speaker so carefully laid out in ‘Effects of Analogy’, in his prose, notably in ‘Imagination as Value’, when he refers to the poet as ‘the orator of the imagination’ (CPP 730). And in ‘Two or Three Ideas’, Stevens comes closest to urging the poet, as Valéry does, to develop a whole new language, replete with ‘mots-musique’ (Cahiers I 516) when he encourages the poet to experiment with language: I have never been able to see why what is called Anglo-Saxon should have the right to higgle and haggle all over the page, contesting the right of other words. If a poem seems to require a hierophantic phrase, the phrase should pass. This is a way of saying that one of the consequences of the ordination of style is not to limit it, but to enlarge it, not to impoverish it, but to enrich and liberate it. (CPP 841) Stevens suggests that the poet extend the normal limits of language in poetry to ‘enrich and liberate it’. His use of the word ‘hierophantic’ is particularly intriguing, for the hierophant’s language is distinctive not only for the mysteries it concerns but for the way those mysteries are spoken or chanted. In ‘Adagia’, too, Stevens gestures towards a more performative approach to poetic language in several entries, including this one: ‘The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so’ (CPP 909). He thereby recalls Valéry’s encouragement to the poet to incorporate musical-poetic techniques such as resonance, modulation and poetic punctuation. It almost seems that in calling to poets to stretch the boundaries of poetry, Valéry anticipates the profoundly musical and vocal poetry of Wallace Stevens, for it is in his poetry that Stevens enlivens their mutual vision of the poem as act.

IV Especially in his early poems, Stevens presents ‘voice’ as a consistent theme. Perhaps the most prescient of these is ‘Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz’ in which


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the poetic speaker ponders an emerging poet, one ‘harmonious skeptic’ who can express the motion of modernity (CPP 101). Stevens suggests that such a poet is not yet present who can speak for ‘These sudden clouds of faces and arms’, this ‘immense suppression, freed’, and he carries the theme of voice into the texture of the poem by juxtaposing ‘These voices crying without knowing for what’ with the poet who will ultimately be able to lend his voice to their experience (CPP 100). In ‘Mozart, 1935’, again exhorting the poet to ‘Play the present’, Stevens speaks with a more urgent voice, this time not simply imagining a voice to come, but commanding that it do so: ‘Be thou the voice, / Not you. Be thou, be thou / The voice of angry fear, / The voice of this besieging pain’ (CPP 107). Of Stevens’ earlier poems, it is in ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ where he seems to put Valéry’s poetic pendulum – the rhythmic oscillation between sound and sense, voice and thought – into motion. Stevens immediately draws the reader into a search for knowledge: along with the poetic speaker, we seek to identify the voice of the woman who ‘sang beyond the genius of the sea’ and, in our search, we probe the large philosophical question of our human relationship to the natural world (CPP 105). Stevens alternates two kinds of speech in this poem, one logical and the other musical, counterpointing them throughout. The logical language is marked by declarative statements, qualifiers and conditional constructions that would all seem to lead to the clarification of an idea: ‘She sang’ (stanza 1); ‘The sea was not a mask’ (stanza 2); ‘For she was the maker of the song’ (stanza 3); ‘If it was only the dark voice of the sea . . . However clear, it would have been deep air’ (stanza 4) (CPP 105). Variations of the word ‘knowledge’ also sound through the poem, and intensify our sense of the poem as a journey of sorts towards knowledge: ‘we understood’ in the first stanza, ‘we knew / It was the spirit that we sought and knew’ in the third, and in the fifth ‘As we beheld her striding there alone, / Knew that there never was a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made’ (CPP 105–6). But in this most musical of poems, Stevens does not let the search for an answer to the philosophical question drive the poem; the language of logic is consistently confused and undercut by mounting musical repetitions. The poem is rich in internal rhyme, alliteration and assonance and, as we hear the ‘we’, ‘she’ and ‘sea’ that echo through its development, Stevens shows us poetically, as Valéry does in theory, that the only way we might grasp the philosophical question is to search through the sound for sense. Behind the grace of Stevens’ voice in ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, we can hear Valéry whispering: ‘Entre la Voix et la Pensée, entre la Pensée et la Voix, entre la Présence et l’Absence, oscille le pendule poétique’ (‘Between the Voice and the Thought, between the Thought and the Voice, between Presence and Absence, oscillates the poetic pendulum’ [Œuvres I 1333]). Stevens extends his thinking about voice much further in later poems, probing, as Valéry does in prose, its ambiguous beauty and suggesting performative possibilities. The greatest Valéryan echo in ‘Variations on a

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Summer Day’ is in the structure of the poem, for to probe the movement of the advancing summer day Stevens offers us 20 distinct variations. One cannot help but think that Stevens fulfils Valéry’s wish here for a fully modulating poem, for in each successive variation Stevens presents us with another way of seeing or ‘manière[s] de voir’ in Valéry’s terms (Cahiers I 628). As he does so, the poetic speaker intermittently directs the movement of the poem by reflecting on the language itself and telling us how to speak it. He begins the poem’s first variation in the imperative, as if he were imagining, as Valéry does in prose, an ideal reader, directing us how to speak: ‘Say of the gulls that they are flying / In light blue air over dark blue sea’ (CPP 212). And in the second, his words eerily echo Valéry’s as he suggests that poetic words – the words that capture or represent the movement of the gulls, the air and sea (together with all the moving images of the poem: the fishes, the sparrows, the piano and so forth) – are neither music nor speech, but must fall in the balance between the two: ‘A music more than a breath, but less / Than the wind, sub-music like sub-speech’ (CPP 212). Later in the poem, Stevens addresses his attention to the kinds of words that we use in poetry, summoning Valéry’s discussion of their transformation into the ‘mots-musique’ of poetry, hinting that the poet must find words to match the movement of what often escapes us: ‘Words add to the senses. The words for the dazzle / Of mica, the dithering of grass’ (CPP 214). To find such words, to locate the voice appropriate to poetry is not a simple matter for either poet, and Stevens alludes to how difficult a process this is in ‘The Creations of Sound’. He again uses the imperative to direct the speaker who, in turn, must direct the poet, ‘X’: Tell X that speech is not dirty silence Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier. It is more than an imitation for the ear. (CPP 275) Poetic speech, Stevens insists, does not issue directly from the person of the poet (he is ‘X’), nor do we replicate exactly what we hear. It is striking in this poem that as Stevens considers the particular language of poetry, he employs a string of negatives – ‘His poems are not of the second part of life. / They do not make the visible a little hard // To see’ – as if it were easier to say what poetic speech is not rather than what it is. As he closes the poem, however, he again comes close to Valéry’s notion of the transformation of discursive words into a distinctive kind of speech and ends on a more affirmative note: We do not say ourselves like that in poems. We say ourselves in syllables that rise From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak.


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Poetic words, Stevens suggests in the final stanza, are distinct from the words we use in daily discourse. He emphasizes, as Valéry does, their sounds (they are ‘syllables’ not words) and their ongoing movement – the syllables ‘rise’ and are ‘rising’. These poetic words derive from our speech (‘We say ourselves’), yet as we speak them, they reach beyond their usual functions – the syllables rise ‘in speech we do not speak’ – and comprise a new kind of language. To close, I would like to suggest a Valéryan lens for one more late Stevens poem, ‘Large Red Man Reading’, for in this poem Stevens imagines, perhaps more than in any other, poetic performance. Here he suggests that in his recitation, the speaker of a poem crosses boundaries and, like Orpheus, even those between life and death: ‘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’ (CPP 365). We must note here that it is not just poetry that crosses the boundaries, but ‘reading, aloud’ that brings back those ghosts. Stevens emphasizes the voice of poetry again by saying of those listeners that they ‘returned to hear him read from the poem of life’. And it is in the voicing and the hearing that they ‘would have wept and been happy . . . And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae’ (ibid.). When he details what he reads, he reminds us of the musical and vocal transformation of words in poetry into Valéry’s ‘mots-musique’ for the poet speaks not words but ‘syllables’. In one last stunning echo, Stevens recalls Valéry’s ‘rêve de poète’ (‘poet’s dream’ [Cahiers I 293]) in his articulation of what the poet communicates to those who have returned. Like Valéry’s dream to represent ‘l’Être vivant ET pensant’ (‘the living AND thinking Being’ [Cahiers I 293]), Stevens’ poet speaks ‘The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law: / Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines’ (CPP 365). When we listen to the ‘[l]arge red man reading’ with Valéry’s theory in mind, we hear each poet’s voice more accurately and fully, and feel Valéry’s presence – and the presence of his French cadences – in Stevens’ American poetic world.

Notes 1. In using the terms ‘expression’ and ‘impression’, I borrow from Valéry’s language in ‘Poésie et pensée abstraite’ (‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’) when he defines poetic movement as follows: ‘Le principe essentiel de la mécanique poétique – c’est-à-dire des conditions de production de l’état poétique par la parole – est à mes yeux cet échange harmonique entre l’expression et l’impression’ (‘The essential principle of the poetic mechanism – that is the conditions that produce the poetic state by means of speech – is, in my view, this harmonic exchange between expression and impression’ [Œuvres I 1332]). 2. Scholars of Stevens who have acknowledged likenesses between Valéry and Stevens are too numerous to name here, yet it is important to note that the list includes

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some of Stevens’ most distinguished readers. In the earlier critical literature, in addition to Bloom and Balakian, are Frank Kermode (Wallace Stevens) and Joseph Riddel (The Clairvoyant Eye). Most recently, George Lensing refers to Valéry in his analysis of the music of Stevens’ ‘Autumn Refrain’ (Wallace Stevens and the Seasons 79 n57). Perhaps most suggestive for future study, Eleanor Cook offers a fascinating discussion of ‘enigma’ in Stevens in relation to Valéry’s philosophic dialogue, Eupalinos ou l’Architecte (Eupalinos or the Architect) in her book, Enigmas and Riddles in Literature (224–5). 3. In my essay, ‘“The Figure Concealed”’, I present a general overview of the Valéryan echo in Stevens. Some points concerning voice in Stevens’ prose are drawn from this earlier work. 4. I confine myself here to Valéry’s theory. For an in-depth and excellent study of Valéry’s poetics of voice that includes a discussion of his poetry, see Christine Crow’s Paul Valéry and the Poetry of Voice. 5. John Hollander, writing of the musical analogy in English poetry, wrote in 1975: ‘The only way in which we might, indeed, save the analogy is by incorporating Stevens’s evolution from song to speech’ (8). It is exactly this kind of evolution that Valéry details in his prose, and which Stevens then realizes in his poems.

Works cited Balakian, Anna. The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal. New York: New York University Press, 1977. Benamou, Michel. Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Cook, Eleanor. Enigmas and Riddles in Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Crow, Christine M. Paul Valéry and the Poetry of Voice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Goldfarb, Lisa. ‘ “The Figure Concealed”: Valéryan Echoes in Stevens’ Ideas of Music’. The Wallace Stevens Journal 28.1 (Spring 2004): 38–58. Hollander, John. Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. Kermode, Frank. Wallace Stevens. London: Faber, 1960. Lensing, George S. Wallace Stevens and the Seasons. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Riddel, Joseph N. The Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965. Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. Valéry, Paul. Œuvres I. Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1957. Valéry, Paul. Œuvres II. Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1960. Valéry, Paul. Cahiers I. Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1973.

Part III Getting It Straight at the Sorbonne? Stevens’ Afterlife in Europe


11 Nicholas Moore, Stevens and the Fortune Press Mark Ford

On 6 October 1968, the book pages of The Sunday Times in London announced a poetry translation competition to be judged by George Steiner. The poem to be translated was the third of Baudelaire’s four spleen poems, the one beginning: Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux, Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très-vieux . . . (138) The three winners would receive copies of The Voyage and Other Versions of Poems by Baudelaire, edited by Robert Lowell and illustrated by Sidney Nolan, and to show how it might be done, the paper printed two earlier translations, one by Lowell and the other by Roy Campbell. In an accompanying article Steiner analysed these efforts, not particularly kindly, but praised the concept of poetry translation itself, asserting that ‘few exercises do more to give insight into poetry and into the nature of a language, where it is singular, and where it relates to other languages’. Some two months later, on 8 December, the winners were announced. Steiner had received 1060 entries, but reported that only a handful had ‘gauged the full difficulty of the original, the sinuous music that sounds under Baudelaire’s firm gait’. The version by the overall winner, one Angus MacPhee, was fulsomely celebrated, but Steiner then drew attention to a bizarre series of entries that he assumed had all come from the same poet, though sent under a range of strange pseudonyms (W. H. Laudanum, H. R. Fixon-Boumphrey, Jago McFaithful Fubb, Rosine McCoolh, Alonso Moriche, Lhoso Cinaremo) and with various spoof or absurdist return addresses (The Hamerican Impassy, P. O. Hoax 1 aaaaaaaaaa). Day after day these versions arrived in ‘fantastically mottoed’ envelopes, typed in green or brown. Their author was possibly American, certainly steeped in Wallace Stevens and forties jazz, and although ‘hors classe’, his dizzying range of approaches (‘parody, pastiche, straight, dialect, free verse, heroic couplets, 165

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quatrains, alcaics’) revealed more than an occasional ‘touch of poetic genius’ (ibid.). Not all this entrant’s return addresses were implausible, and Lhoso Cinaremo’s (89 Oakdene Road, St Mary Cray, Kent, BR5 2AL) was in fact not fictitious at all. It was where the poet Nicholas Moore, one of the brightest stars in the London poetry firmament of the 1940s, had lived for two decades in almost total obscurity. His most recent publication had been The Tall Bearded Iris (1956), an exhaustive and meticulous guide to the culture and cross-breeding of the iris, ‘the poor man’s orchid’, a plant ‘comparatively neglected’ but exhibiting, Moore declares in his preface, ‘a beauty of form and a range of colour that makes it a fit flower for a poet or a queen’ (9). A life and career such as Moore’s cannot help bringing to mind Wordsworth’s famous couplet, ‘We poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness’ (155). By the time he reached the age of 30 in 1948, Moore had published eight collections of poetry and composed much of the work that went into his ninth, and perhaps finest volume, Recollections of the Gala, which eventually came out in 1950. He was so prolific he could afford to publish one volume, 35 Anonymous Odes (1944) anonymously, and another, the magical The War of the Little Jersey Cows (1945) under the pseudonym Guy Kelly – in homage to the ill-fated jazz trumpeter of that name. As many as 200 poems from this period remain unpublished. A collected volume of all the poetry Moore wrote up to 1948 – a thing much to be desired – would run to well over 500 pages and would contain some of the most delicate, exciting, inventive and moving poems of the twentieth century. And many of these poems, at least up until the rueful – and occasionally bitter – Recollections, radiate a ‘gladness’ not much associated with the dominant traditions of British poetry since Thomas Hardy. Moore was born in Cambridge in 1918, the eldest son of the philosopher G. E. Moore. His uncle was T. Sturge Moore, a well-known poet and engraver in his day, but now best remembered as one of Yeats’s most devoted correspondents. Yeats was a powerful influence on the young Nicholas Moore, as were Eliot and Pound and Auden, but the Modernist master who most excited him was undoubtedly Wallace Stevens. ‘For all the pretty noise’, he wrote in ‘The Waves of Red Balloons’, which is dedicated to Stevens, I found him foremost The four past masters on the trumpet nothing To his green lines of verse, for in them grew A subtler form of mastery than theirs. His was the elegiac mystery. (CDG 23) This poem was first published in 1942. Stevens’ work had by then gained some influential British admirers, such as Julian Symons and Cyril Connolly, but was in general little known. Moore had probably first come across it

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in Conrad Aiken’s Modern American Poets (1922) which included five poems that would feature in the following year’s Harmonium: ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’, a truncated version of ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ and ‘Domination of Black’. That Moore aimed to emulate ‘the subtler form of mastery’ of Stevens from the outset is illustrated by ‘Poem for the New Year’, which was composed in 1936 when he was only 18, and which opens The Glass Tower: Take this down then, this poem: write it on the rich parchments of your memory, in the profound book of your heart: remember that the words are red as fire and twice as hot. Pore over it then, my darling: swathe it in sentimental swaddling-clothes: use plush romantic phrases: say ‘It is engraven in my deepest soul, where loved roses burn like pagodas, temples of a love that is divine, my love for you.’ Go on: be sentimental while you can: this is no time for strictness: phrase is all. (9) Certainly this echoes any number of Harmonium poems in which Stevens woos his Muse in self-consciously hyperbolic language that is at once mocking and defiantly celebratory of extravagance. Carolyn Masel has linked ‘Poem for the New Year’ in particular with ‘Two Figures in Dense Violet Night’, one of Stevens’ Key West poems: ‘Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear’, Stevens urges her; ‘Use dusky words and dusky images. / Darken your speech’ (CPP 69; Masel 127). But the comparison also makes clear the central difference between the two poets, and their conception of their poetry’s inspiration and audience. Moore’s is directed, like so many of those he went on to write over the next 12 years, to an actual beloved, to a real person – who was nearly always his first wife Priscilla, to whom he dedicated poem after poem after poem. ‘Two Figures in Dense Violet Night’ is addressed, on the other hand, to the one of fictive music, to Stevens’ interior paramour, his Infanta Marina, that is to an abstract figure of poetic potential – who must remain abstract for poetic inspiration to continue. In 1938, while an undergraduate at Cambridge, Moore wrote to Stevens requesting poems for the magazine Seven, which he had co-founded that

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year with John Goodland.1 Stevens obliged with ‘The Blue Buildings in the Summer Air’, which appeared in the magazine’s third issue alongside poems by Lawrence Durrell, Parker Tyler (the editor of the American Surrealist magazine View) and a number of the poets associated with the movement rather unfortunately dubbed The New Apocalypse – Dylan Thomas, Dorian Cooke, Henry Treece and J. F. Hendry.2 Further Stevens poems appeared in Issue 5 (‘Thunder by the Musician’) and Issue 8 (‘Yellow Afternoon’). Moore wound up Seven in 1940, and the following year announced his arrival on the national poetry scene with no fewer than four collections – two longish volumes, A Wish in Season and The Island and the Cattle (both Fortune Press), and two pamphlets, A Book for Priscilla and Buzzing Around with a Bee. In 1942 the Fortune Press issued what is perhaps Moore’s most Stevensian volume, The Cabaret, the Dancer, the Gentleman, as well as the Fortune Anthology, edited by Moore, which opened with two major Stevens poems, ‘Asides on the Oboe’ and ‘Mrs. Alfred Uruguay’. For a miscellany entitled the Atlantic Anthology (1943), again published by the Fortune Press, Moore entered into negotiations with Stevens for rights to sections of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, which Stevens had arranged, rather against the wishes of his main publisher, Alfred Knopf, to be issued in a deluxe limited edition by the Cummington Press of Cummington, Massachusetts. Since Stevens still owned the copyright to this poem, which would not appear under the imprint of Knopf until the publication of Transport to Summer in 1947, he was able to make the poem available to Moore – though this would again occasion Knopf’s displeasure – and the Atlantic Anthology included eight sections of Stevens’ longest poem.3 Stevens had long hoped to acquire a British publisher and readership, and in March of 1944 finally received a definite proposal: the Fortune Press wrote to him asking for permission to publish a volume of Selected Poems to be edited, of course, by his chief English admirer. The Fortune Press’s commitment to a young poetic tyro, like Nicholas Moore, and its eagerness to publish the work of an avant-garde American poet ‘comparatively little known in England’, as the contributor’s note in the Atlantic Anthology puts it, leads one to imagine an astute editor passionate about innovative poetry, and one willing to waive all financial considerations just so long as he could get the work of poets he cherished into print. Such imaginings could hardly be further from the truth. R. A. Caton founded the Fortune Press in 1924 in the hope of imitating the financial success which the Nonesuch Press was enjoying with its handsome editions of the classics. So much did Caton admire the Nonesuch’s Symposium and their selection of Apuleius (Cupid and Psyche) that he more or less pirated them and only agreed to withdraw his editions under threat of legal proceedings. He made good such losses, however, according to a memoir by Timothy d’Arch Smith, an associate in the books business, by running a brisk black market trade in tickets for the tennis at Wimbledon, and then branching out into more lucrative publishing fields: his best seller was The Diary of a Boy (which used to be


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embellished with a printed band declaring it ‘A Book for All Schoolmasters’), one of many titles exploring what d’Arch Smith calls ‘the more arcane side of public-school life’ (13). Other Fortune publications intended to make up the shortfall incurred by a disastrous five-volume edition of the works of Thomas Shadwell were The Songs of Bilitis: Translated from the Greek, Aphrodite: A Novel of Ancient Morals, The Confessions of Madeleine Bavent, The Perfumed Garden and Strato’s Boyish Muse. Alas, after a prosecution for obscene libel in 1934, Caton was obliged to destroy all remaining copies of these, though it turned out he did not entirely comply with this order. Caton’s earliest ventures into poetry publishing in the 1920s had resulted in slim volumes by the young Cecil Day-Lewis and – somehow inevitably – the not-so-young Lord Alfred Douglas. Astute hoarding of paper in the years before the war meant that when he returned to the fray in 1939, Caton was almost the only publisher willing to take on new poets. Notoriously secretive, he left no indication as to why he chose to publish the poets he did, but it must be acknowledged his list had a number of significant hits – in literary terms anyway: the Fortune Press published collections by Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Roy Fuller, Christopher Middleton and F. T. Prince (his magnificent Soldiers Bathing [1954]), and its anthologies featured the work of Keith Douglas, Sidney Keyes, Lawrence Durrell, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Caton also published Larkin’s first novel, Jill (1944), an unsparing account of a socially maladroit lower middle-class student’s successive humiliations while at Oxford in the war years; its jacket copy, however, advertised titles such as Climbing Boy, Barbarian Boy and A Diary of the Teens by a Boy, and Kingsley Amis reported finding a copy of Jill in a shop in Coventry Street nestled between Naked and Unashamed and High-Heeled Yvonne.4 Amis and Larkin developed what Larkin called a ‘Caton mystique’ (Selected Letters 378) during the time both were on his books, nicknaming him Lazy Sod Caton (by analogy with blues singers such as Sleepy John Estes or Blind Boy Fuller), and often performing duets in pubs on a song that unfortunately does not survive, ‘Caton’s Blues’. In Lucky Jim (1954) L. S. Caton is a mysterious and elusive academic publisher who prints under his own name an Italian translation of Jim Dixon’s one and only academic article on the ‘strangely neglected topic’ of ‘The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450–1485’, an article Caton had accepted for publication in his own fictive history journal (see Lucky Jim 14–15). He also has walk-on roles in four further Amis novels, eventually meeting a gory end in The Anti-Death League (1966). ‘Really I suppose I ought to be grateful to that bum-hunting old relic of the Twenties’, Larkin wrote in a letter of 1966 just before The North Ship was reissued by Faber, ‘but he is/was such a cheating old swine that my normal generosity is shrivelled’ (Selected Letters 384). Larkin and Caton met once in a tea shop in Victoria to discuss – somewhat ironically in the context of the Fortune Press’s list – the printer’s objections to a few mild expletives in Jill.

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It was ‘no joke’, Caton advised the young writer, to find yourself in the dock on an obscenity charge, before discoursing generally on the use of swearwords: ‘You hear errand-boys using “sod” for instance. Do you think they know what it means?’ (see Larkin, Required Writing 26 and d’Arch Smith 14). Wallace Stevens, ever in quest of the rare and new, especially if it came from abroad, had written for a Fortune Press catalogue as early as 1927. He had also struck up an acquaintance with G. E. Moore, whom he had met on a number of occasions during the philosopher’s wartime sojourn in America. He seems, further, to have been impressed in some measure by the poetry of Moore fils, describing him to Harry Duncan of the Cummington Press as ‘one of the younger English poets, very active, and potentially one of the best, if not the best of them’ (qtd in Masel 126). Moore’s The Glass Tower (a volume of new and selected poems from 1936–43, interspersed with wonderful drawings by the young Lucian Freud) contained not only ‘The Waves of Red Balloons’ but a poem, ‘Yesterday’s Sailors’, subtitled ‘In homage to Wallace Stevens’, and a number of pieces that make direct use not only of Stevensian rhetoric, but of Stevens’ method of creating a long sequence out of a set of interconnected lyrics. Moore was also aware, however, that Stevens’ work was likely to meet with resistance or bafflement or both from British reviewers and readers, so decided to write an article outlining the ways in which a Stevens poem could be approached, interpreted and enjoyed. His analysis of ‘The Woman That Had More Babies Than That’ in the tenth issue of the magazine Poetry London, edited by the flamboyant literary entrepreneur, Tambimuttu (of whom more later), is a model of its kind. Moore concedes the poem may at first appear ‘difficult’, but then develops a lucid, intelligent, but also tentative study of it that adheres closely to the poem’s particulars, and climaxes in an uplifting vision of the powers of poetry which Stevens’ poem itself celebrates. His delight in Stevens’ confidence in the imagination is infectious: ‘We too rejoice’, he concludes, ‘that she [the Muse] is to be found in so many places: in fact in any place in which she is seriously sought’ (221). Like Stevens, Moore conceives of the poet as an acrobat, a point he stressed by deciding to title his Selected Poems (edited by Peter Riley and posthumously published in 1990), Longings of the Acrobats. Stevens’ poem opens: An acrobat on the border of the sea Observed the waves, the rising and the swell And the first line spreading up the beach . . . (CPP 201)5 ‘The acrobat’, Moore explains, ‘is the poet.’ And yet Moore’s poetry of the 1940s never quite finds a way of embracing the acrobatics of Stevensian abstraction, or the belief that poetry can be what this poem calls ‘an elevation, an elixir of the whole’. Indeed, a number


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of his poems seem to develop out of the premiss that it is impossible to imbue the English scene, its landscapes and politics and social and poetic conventions, with Stevensian vistas of possibility. In ‘Ideas of Disorder at Torquay’, for instance, the prospect of change is construed as a threat rather than an opportunity to discover the ‘ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds’ of a ‘music constant to move’ (CPP 106, 202). The poem’s knitting aunts are the antithesis of Stevens’ singer on the beach in ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, or of the maternal muse of ‘The Woman That Had More Babies Than That’ who inspires the self to recognize in her ‘the images of desire, the forms that speak, / The ideas that come to it with a sense of speech’ (CPP 202). Moore’s ‘quiet, contented ladies’, on the other hand, are disgusted at the very thought of change, and found their identities on resistance and dislike, on ‘thrilling distaste’ for the new: who would not, among lupins and roses, Watching the quiet foam of Devon water, And doing duty with wound reams of wool, Contemplating disorder . . . Who would not Protest that such order might be destroyed? The same thrilling distaste runs through the roses, As cold disaster in detective stories. (CDG 30) Torquay’s lupins and roses and the women’s reams of wool are specific and actual, rather than symbolic or illustrative. Stevens’ use of the quotidian at the end of ‘The Woman That Had More Babies Than That’ is far more generalized: They find her in the crackling summer night, In the Duft of towns, beside a window, beside A lamp, in a day of the week, the time before spring, A manner of walking, yellow fruit, a house, A street. (CPP 203) Moore’s poem ends also with an expression of love for the ordinary, but one inspired by anxiety rather than ‘elevation’: Something, the essence of a change that seems A breaking up of order, something grave Troubles the waters of contentment, moves The old, cold ladies to a troubled love. Moore’s own love, as presented in his poems of the forties, is surprisingly untroubled. He married Priscilla in 1940, and dedicated numerous volumes

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and a large percentage of his poems to her. For Moore poetry was a way of extending and expanding his personal happiness into the public arena. Peter Riley has suggested that his achievement was based on a new realisation of the poem set in the individual life-experience, not in the reductive and self-distanced mode of the poetry popular in the fifties, but as richly as possible, bearing the entire lyric past on a personal fulcrum. There are many registers and much of the spectrum is observed, or extrapolated into fiction or surrealistic displacement, but I think the centre was an optimistic, celebratory and serious engagement with the distances of poetry grasped in the success of personal experience, and especially inter-personal love. (57)6 Moore was gifted with an unusual ability to write about his own ‘gladness’ in a manner neither awkward nor sentimental nor complacent nor self-congratulatory. The war is of course the backdrop to many of these poems, but there is rarely anything exploitative in the way he represents his relationship with Priscilla in the context of their historical times. Rather the poems reveal an unselfconscious honesty as they move from private to public and back again, avoiding the shrill and melodramatic, concerned only to do justice to the multifaceted ordinariness of the experience recalled. Consider for example a poem from his first collection, A Wish in Season (1941), called, like so many others, simply ‘Poem’ and dedicated to Priscilla: Here a hand lay. Here in a chair a body Slumped, book in hand, and you leant over it. Hands touched the rough stuff of your coat, And face touched face. O here, my dear, The first idea of resting found its place. Now in this quiet hour, listening to traffic, While the sun sways us and the music hovers Over this tragic season: while the guns Boom on over the continent, I see Amply the simple movement of our love. For it is safe within this cushioned place. Not that we have not noticed with despair The frontiers shot down, the battle going The way all battles go, but here this minute We have our own more simple resting-place. (10) Moore’s faith in love here contrasts sharply with that of, say, Auden in ‘Lullaby’, with its insistence on the momentary nature of the refuge love offers – ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm’ (31).


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Moore’s less theatrical poem envisages the opposite, a slow, equable, plausible unfolding of intimacy: ‘I see / Amply the simple movement of our love.’ How skilfully the first stanza mimes the exchange of affection without attempting to impress on us the uniqueness or specialness of the lovers, and how comforting to be allowed to think of love as shared ‘resting’ rather than something transcendent or active. The references to guns and battle in the second and third stanzas do not serve to heighten the lovers’ shared ‘minute’, but rather seem to demonstrate how impossible it was to go for long without thinking about the war in 1941. And while ‘Poem’ obviously lacks Stevens’ sublime glitter and dizzying expansiveness, it does, it seems to me, movingly articulate a robust adequacy, both emotional and linguistic, to the layered complexity of the moment it captures, to the interplay of distant perils, ‘simple’ satisfactions and hopeful conjecture. Moore registered as a conscientious objector during the war, but managed to avoid prison; instead, he was sent to East Anglia to work on potato farms. He composed numerous elegies for friends who died in the conflict, and occasionally he assayed an Audenesque denunciation of England, or threatened ‘the unjust’ with impending revolution – ‘like an earthquake the last day will arrive’ (GT 53). In ‘A Letter from Prison’ of 1941, he glances enviously across the Atlantic to the rapturous vision of American freedom hymned by Stevens in the final stanza of ‘Sunday Morning’: We see the ruin that is round us here. We live imprisoned on our island, free Only to whisper, falter, and obey The dictates of this governmental war. . . (A Book for Priscilla 3; see also Masel 130) But at times he imagines, as Stevens often did, a reciprocity between poet and soldier; if, as Stevens insists at the conclusion of ‘Notes’, ‘The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines’ (CPP 352), then equally, Moore asserts in ‘Buzzing Around With a Bee’: art is a thing of love, Flickers in and out of bush and flower, Gathering honey even from a war, The pints of blood the panting soldier gives. (GT 67) Neither, it could well be argued, are at their most convincing when attempting to theorize war through explorations of aesthetics, but Moore did, I think, learn from Stevens poems such as ‘The Death of a Soldier’ or ‘Asides

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on the Oboe’ how to develop oblique and subtle perspectives on fear and devastation, as in the four-line poem ‘In a Quiet House’: I, under the shadow of gun and glory, who sit in a still room In a quiet house with my words and my lifted pen, Meek and minute as a mouse in a ring of wood, Sit shuddering in the shadows of a million lion-hungry and mousehaunted men. (The Island and the Cattle 41) Like ‘Here a hand lay . . .’, such a poem deftly mediates between inner calm and outer turmoil, this time to create a vivid sense both of the world on the brink of war and of the powers of the individual to resist ‘the pressure of reality’, to borrow a formulation of Stevens’, ‘by placing it in his imagination’ (CPP 656–7). The year 1944 was not an auspicious one in which to set about presenting Stevens to British poetry readers. Stevens was himself aware that, as he put it in a letter to Knopf, ‘[t]aste in the two countries is quite different’ (8 November 1946, qtd in Edelstein 99), and felt that only an English editor could be trusted to make a suitable selection for the English market. Given Caton’s notoriously unconventional approach to the business of acquiring books (Larkin was convinced he had accepted both Jill and The North Ship without reading them), Stevens was surely right to see Moore as the prime mover behind the Fortune Press’s offer. On May 9 he wrote to thank Moore for promoting the project: ‘No doubt I owe this suggestion to your interest and kindness, for which I am sincerely grateful’, he began, before outlining some of the copyright issues that would have to be negotiated, and explaining to Moore that nothing could be undertaken without the express permission of ‘Mr. Knopf’ (qtd in Lensing 134–5). Mr Knopf had been growing increasingly irritated by Stevens’ dealings with small independent publishers, such as the Alcestis Press (who had published limited print-run editions of Ideas of Order and Owl’s Clover in 1935 and 1936) and the Cummington Press, who had issued a second limited edition of Notes in 1943, and were planning a deluxe edition of Esthétique du Mal, with illustrations by Paul Wightman Williams, for 1945. Even Stevens’ trade publications sold in relatively small quantities in the forties (the initial print runs of Parts of a World and Transport to Summer were 1000 and 1750 respectively), and while Knopf welcomed the interest of a British publisher, he was also conscious that, as he put it in a letter to Stevens of 1 November 1945, ‘there could never be any money involved for anyone in connection with placing your books in England’. ‘In thirty years of publishing’, he continued acerbically, ‘I give you my word I have never run into such a mess all around as arose, or so it seems to me, from these English people discovering that they could deal with you and with us at one and the same time’ (qtd in Lensing 139).


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The English people referred to in this letter were not only Moore and Caton, but also the not very English Tambimuttu, on whose behalf a London literary agent, Laurence Pollinger, had written to Knopf in September of 1943 expressing an interest in Stevens, and requesting copies of his books. Stevens had not been informed of this, and was startled to receive on 10 August 1944, five months after Fortune’s approach, a letter from Tambimuttu himself also requesting permission to publish his work. Tambi, as he was universally known, claimed descent from a line of ancient kings in Jaffna in northern Ceylon, as it was then known, a country in which Stevens was much interested on account of his epistolary relationship with the planter and writer Leonard C. van Geyzel, who gratified Stevens’ taste for the exotic by despatching to Hartford numerous Ceylonese carvings and trinkets. Tambi had burst onto the London literary scene in 1939 at the age of 24 with the magazine Poetry London, which quickly established itself as the leading outlet for many of the writers whom Moore had published in Seven: Dylan Thomas, George Barker, Herbert Read and Lawrence Durrell all featured in the first issue. Nicholas Moore had first met Tambi in early 1939 and in 1941 had edited Poetry London’s first venture into poetry book publishing, a series of pamphlets by G. S. Fraser, Anne Ridler, George Scurfield and Moore’s own Buzzing Around with a Bee. Moore also began working for the magazine Poetry London, as Tambi’s ‘first line of defence’ as he later put it in his memoir ‘Tambi the Knife’, sorting through the unsolicited poems and short stories sent into the magazine (60). Encouraged by responses to Poetry London, which T. S. Eliot had declared the only magazine where ‘I can consistently expect to find new poets who matter’ (qtd in Tambimuttu 276), Tambi decided to expand operations, and in July of 1943 launched his full poetry list with Kathleen Raine’s Stone and Flower, with drawings by Barbara Hepworth, which was followed by the 18-year-old Michael Hamburger’s translations of Hölderlin (the first of many such volumes), David Gascoyne’s Poems 1937–1942, illustrated by Graham Sutherland, collections by Anne Ridler, G. S. Fraser, Charles Williams and Moore’s The Glass Tower, featuring a spectacular jacket, title page and some 15 drawings by Lucian Freud, three of them in colour. To Stevens, who cared so much about book production, and whose Esthétique du Mal would soon appear in a sumptuous illustrated edition, the prospect of being published by Editions Poetry London was instantly appealing. Production values on Fortune Press books, as he already knew from the volumes he had acquired and the copies of Moore’s own books the young poet had sent him, were adequate, but could hardly compete with Tambi’s lavish house style. Further, though Stevens may not have known this, the Fortune Press suffered from crippling distribution difficulties. Caton’s ‘fierce independence’, as d’Arch Smith puts it, ‘would not permit of his employing a regular representative or even a packer. Booksellers, despairing of getting the books they had ordered, gave up trying. He had acute storage problems’ (12).

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Caton refused, except in extreme circumstances, to use the telephone, and devoted much time to his dubious other career as a rentier – he died owning 91 houses in Brighton, ‘not a bathroom among them’, as he liked to boast. (When questioned about his shabby appearance and filthy clothes he would explain he did not want his tenants to know he had enough money to carry out the many repairs these houses needed.) Books and dust-jackets were kept in separate warehouses miles apart. All of this, to quote d’Arch Smith again, ‘campaigned against the very rudiments of publishing efficiency’ (ibid.). A deal with a bookseller called Sequana was scuppered by his 1934 obscenity trial. For mysterious reasons he then entered into an arrangement with a chain of surgical stores, ‘among whose esoteric artefacts displayed in the windows could often be glimpsed his characteristic yellow wrappers’ (ibid.). A selected Stevens for sale in such a context would almost have rivalled the sight of Whitman’s first edition of Leaves of Grass jostling for space on book racks in the phrenology parlours of mid-century Manhattan. Stevens forwarded Poetry London’s offer to Knopf, who seems to have distrusted and disliked Tambimuttu from the start.7 But Stevens was ‘very much interested in seeing something of this sort done’, as he put it in his covering letter to Knopf, in which he offered to waive all payment for rights (14 September 1944, qtd in Lensing 136). He received back, however, a letter explaining that, despite certain doubts about the Fortune Press, Knopf had already reached agreement with them, and a contract was in preparation. On learning of this from Stevens, Tambi, nothing daunted, suggested that even with a Fortune Press Selected on the market, he would still be eager to publish three further volumes of Stevens’ work at Editions Poetry London. Such a prospect was even more tempting, especially as Moore himself was now involved editorially in the firm and was one of the brightest prospects on their fledgling list. Further, by the winter of 1944 Moore’s own relationship with Caton had reached breaking point, although that year the Fortune Press had issued his 35 Anonymous Odes anonymously, and in 1945 would publish his pseudonymous volume, The War of the Little Jersey Cows.8 By the summer of 1945 Moore had, at any rate, clearly shaken the dust of the Fortune Press off his feet, for in a letter of July 10 he denounced Caton to Stevens in no uncertain terms, and reiterated Tambi’s offer of a three-book deal: Editions Poetry London would publish Parts of a World, a collection of recent work including ‘Notes’ and ‘Esthétique du Mal’, and a more general selection of 50 poems, presumably roughly those he had planned to include in the Fortune Press edition. Stevens again responded enthusiastically – only to learn from Knopf that Caton was now in possession of a signed agreement for permission to publish the first British edition of Stevens’ Selected Poems and was in no mood to compromise. But who would edit such a volume? Moore’s rupture with Caton meant that he was no longer a candidate; Stevens himself flatly refused to undertake the task of self-selection when pressed to do so by Caton in October of 1946.


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Instead, he passed this letter on to Knopf who, exasperated by the whole affair, had no suggestions to make. The Fortune Press’s licence officially expired on 31 December 1946, and nothing would be heard of them on Stevens’ side for another six years. Stevens was not the only influence on Moore’s poetry of the forties. One detects the impact of Southern writers such as John Peale Bishop and Robert Penn Warren, as well as the early work of Howard Nemerov and Weldon Kees. He was, in turn, one of the few English poets of his generation – something of a ‘lost generation’, in many ways, ever-shadowed by war and its aftermath, uneasily suspended in literary history between the edgy brilliance of the poets of the thirties and the sober ironies of the Movement – to establish a significant reputation in America. There was Dylan Thomas of course – but he was Welsh and famous for extra-poetic reasons. Moore’s poems appeared in nearly all of the leading American journals of the time: Contemporary Poetry, The Chimera, Prairie Schooner, Sewanee Review, Furioso, Perspective, New Directions, View (Parker Tyler returning the compliment), Poetry World, Poetry (Chicago), which honoured him with its Harriet Monroe Prize in 1947. W. H. Laudanum, or rather Auden, awarded Contemporary Poetry’s Patron Prize of 1945 to ‘Girl with a Wine Glass’. His work often reflected his deep and knowledgeable love of jazz and a fascination with American popular culture.9 Moore excelled in ditties and rags, off-beat ballads, witty lounge lyrics with a literary swing: Joyce was walking in heaven when He was accosted by a wren. The little wren said, ‘Good afternoon,’ But Joyce said, ‘Allaquill oola roon.’ (‘The Death of James Joyce’, The War of the Little Jersey Cows 31) His books are populated by weirdly-named characters such as Miss Hadastra Himmeny, Mr Ullubux, Dr Inferticle, Unity Quitbread, Mr Amotion, Invento Fiske, Mr Elcologue, Mr Orlimpit. Often his work exudes a dreamy freshness, creating an odd but addictive space in which the anxieties of the day float free of their contexts, subtly re-angled and neutralized by the imagination. ‘Happy without Sex’ in Recollections of the Gala, seems to describe this process: He sits and gazes on the taut volcanoes Ready to explode, and muses on the speeches Of the politicians. It is never-never land. Down below, as he watches from his cape, Lie the happy countries, green and yellow with sun, And people moving about like beetles. Ah!

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To sit alone on a rock above the world In the sweet sunshine, and to hear the chatter Of the diplomats as a distant murmur of bees On a summer’s day. (43) But other poems in this volume have a much darker undertow, and speak of betrayal, abandonment, confusion: Out in the garden there I felt her vows Contort like snakes and bind me to a cross, No hero, no, nor noble rider I, The sexual splendour false, my love a lie. (‘Meeting in a Garden’, 57) In ‘Lovers under the Elms’ Moore evokes Rochester’s poem ‘Upon Nothing’, from which it draws an epigraph, to conjugate the paradoxes of absence and loss: Nothing comes like a faint prick under the eyelids Or a trick played on one by one’s enemy; Nothing becomes a giant, but is nowhere In the air or sea or sky. Is disease, despair, incalculable misfortune . . . (56) Nothing comes ‘like a sudden cancer / Or a long spell of cold and snow’, ‘exhausts and does not give, / Leaves by no window, nor by death’, ‘ranges everywhere, but is nothing, Nothing only, / Itself, immovable’. Certainly, in the watershed year of 1948, Moore’s own misfortunes descended ‘like a sudden cancer’ and inaugurated ‘a long spell of cold and snow’. The chief of these was the break-up of his marriage to Priscilla. ‘“That was the big disaster for Moore”’, Peter Riley explained in an interview with Iain Sinclair on the subject of Moore’s life and poetry published in the latter’s ‘novel’ Downriver; ‘“he was left with no wife – which devastated him. She went off with somebody else”’ (310). She took with her their five-year-old daughter Juliet, whose birth in 1943 Moore had celebrated in the delightful ‘For My Baby Daughter’. Around the same time he lost the modicum of financial support he received from his parents. Moore found himself with no family, nowhere to live and not much to live on – for his editorial work for Tambi was irregularly and poorly paid. In extremis, he decided to try and turn to account his talent for gardening. He took a job in a seed-merchant’s shop in London and responded to an advertisement for lodgings that he


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had spotted in a tobacconist’s window. These lodgings were in St Mary Cray, Orpington, an area of outer London suburbia described by Riley as ‘“the most dismal place you could possibly think of living in”’ (ibid.). Shortly after moving there he lost much of his correspondence with Stevens; knowing these letters were valuable, he carried them around with him in his wallet, only to have his pocket picked while browsing in a street market in London. Recollections of the Gala appeared in 1950, but rather than being hailed as Moore’s most accomplished volume, it aroused little interest. By the middle of the decade the work of two of Caton’s other protégés, Amis and Larkin, had contributed to a decisive alteration in the climate of British poetry; the ideals of all associated with the New Apocalypse were routinely derided by the new vanguard as vague and silly. Moore was not to publish another full collection in his lifetime, unless one counts the 31 Spleen translations which Menard Press issued in 1973. In a biographical note to this he presents himself as spending the years ‘1950 (approx.) to 1964 engaged unprofitably in various forms of horticulture’ (59).10 Among the vast mass of papers Moore accumulated in his Orpington maisonette during the 38 years he lived there, there are few poems dating from the fifties or early sixties. He married again, ‘became ill with a gangrened foot’, to quote again from the 1973 autobiographical note, ‘and was found to have diabetes’. He cultivated his garden, even after a leg had to be amputated and he was confined to a wheelchair. At various points his Spleen poems allude obliquely to his illness. The second, for instance, is titled ‘On the Islets of Langerhans’, a reference not to some remote Baudelairean tropical atoll, but a group of endocrine cells in the pancreas which are crucial to the treatment of the diabetic. Here Baudelaire’s final line (‘Où coule au lieu de sang l’eau verte du Léthé’) becomes ‘my frozen limbs turn green – / Where flows not blood, but Lethe – with gangrene’ (20). As a whole, however, the sequence is anything but self-pitying. The Stevens version, called ‘Pepe-le-Moko au Montrachetle-Jardin’, opens with every instrument in the Stevensian orchestra in full blare: Beau Roi of Serpentines in thunderous mish-mash! Golden glissadings, O empty effendi of air, The tutors’ fulgurations, fine flickerings of frenzy, leave You like a Dodo in the abattoirs. (46) This version’s epigraph, ‘Ay-mi! / One feels its action moving in the blood’ from ‘Esthétique du Mal’, neatly connects Stevens’ most searching analysis of human pain with Baudelaire’s paralysing vision of ennui, and then in turn with Moore’s own sense of being ‘impuissant’ or helpless in his fight against the enemy within. The lines from ‘Esthétique du Mal’ just before those he

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quotes must have seemed particularly relevant to the chronic suffering he was enduring: The assassin discloses himself, The force that destroys us is disclosed, within This maximum, an adventure to be endured With the politest helplessness. Ay-mi! One feels its action moving in the blood. (CPP 285) According to Riley, however, Moore adopted a suitably Stevensian approach to his illness, eating, to keep up his sugar levels, quantities of French chocolate biscuits and indulging, against all medical advice, his taste for wine. Everywhere in Spleen, however extravagant the pastiche or seemingly whimsical its dictions, one is painfully aware of the aptness of the original both to Moore’s medical condition and to the odd literary limbo in which he had been living since the ‘gala’ of the forties. The poem even included a reference to the flower on which he had written his monograph, and had specialized in cross-breeding: ‘Son lit fleurdelisé se transforme en tombeau’. The fleur-de-lys is another name for the iris, as a number of Moore’s versions point out, perhaps with a glance out the window to his own garden and flower-beds, once a blaze of colour, now overgrown with weeds: ‘My bed among the iris is a tomb’, ‘His iris-canopied bed is like a gravestone’, ‘My bedspread, flowered with iris, is a grave’s’, ‘My bed, with its iris decor, turns into a sarcophagus’ (23, 30, 42, 40). ‘You have taken a bad beating’, Stevens apparently wrote to Moore after the tug of war over his Selected Poems between the Fortune Press and Editions Poetry London had resulted in Caton’s being granted a licence to publish, a licence he periodically renewed but seemed disinclined to act upon (see ‘Tambi the Knife’ 63). Knopf’s irritation at what he saw as Stevens’ doubledealing seems to have alarmed the poet into a hasty retreat from all attempts to negotiate publishing matters on his own initiative. The most important thing, as he put it in a letter of 20 November 1945 to the anthologist Oscar Williams, was to ‘keep relations with Knopf topside up’ (qtd in Lensing 140). Editions Poetry London folded in 1951, and the following year Tambi moved to America, where he tried, not very successfully, to revive his magazine as Poetry London / New York.11 It was in 1951 also that Faber first approached Knopf about a Stevens Selected. Eliot’s tardiness in adding Stevens to a list that had built its reputation by publishing such as Pound, Marianne Moore, Auden and Eliot himself has been much commented upon (see, for instance, Jenkins 5 and Brazeau 155). For a time Marianne Moore was considered as a successor to Nicholas as the one to select from Stevens’ still burgeoning oeuvre, but in the event the poet was persuaded to decide what went into this 160-page volume – which is still in print – himself.


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The Fortune Press’s last extension from Knopf expired in the summer of 1951, shortly before negotiations with Faber commenced. Unbothered by such niceties and unmindful of his previous entanglements with the law, Caton at last decided to honour his commitment to Stevens and rushed out a volume edited by Dennis Williamson, who was himself a young poet on Fortune’s list. This Selected pre-empted Faber’s by six weeks, and certainly seems to have been put together in some haste, for it proceeds according to the ordering of Stevens’ volumes, from ‘The Plot Against the Giant’ (the fifth poem in Harmonium) to ‘Contrary Theses (II)’ (the fourth from last in Parts of a World), but then – the editor (or printer?) clearly finding he had more pages to fill – doubles back to the beginning of Harmonium (‘Earthy Anecdote’, ‘Invective Against Swans’, ‘The Paltry Nude’, ‘Domination of Black’), moves on to the beginning of Ideas of Order (‘Farewell to Florida’), and concludes with some randomly chosen poems from Parts of a World. Among those to whom review copies were dispatched was Nicholas Moore, and this volume, which I purchased from a bookseller, suggests some unhappiness with Williamson’s choices. He has copied out in full on spare pages in the book and on loose leaves folded into the back a number of poems he must have felt any decent Selected should include, but which did not make it into Williamson’s: ‘Infanta Marina’, ‘Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock’, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, ‘The Idiom of the Hero’, ‘Asides on the Oboe’, ‘Holiday in Reality’, ‘Flyer’s Fall’, ‘The Pastor Caballero’. In the index various poems are marked by signs which relate to three categories: the ‘socio-aesthetic problem of [the] artist’s relation to his environment’, the ‘aesthetic epistemological relation of imagination to reality’ and the ‘problem of belief (metaphysical and theological)’. The loose leaves at the back also contain some dense close-readings of favourite poems such as ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’, ‘The Emperor of IceCream’ and ‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’. Moore may have been, in late 1952, on the verge of entering the poetical wilderness, but clearly his love of the work of Wallace Stevens still burned bright. The Fortune volume had, of course, to be withdrawn. Like the Nonesuch Press before them, Knopf first remonstrated, but when ‘simple suasion failed’, they threatened legal action; their London lawyers ‘had some trouble locating the proprietor’ (letter of Herbert Weinstock to Stevens, 27 February 1953, qtd in Edelstein 100), but Caton was at length tracked down and made to agree to destroy all remaining copies. In fact, though, he simply stuffed them under the stairs of his book repository in Terminal House, whence many leaked on to the first editions market. The book even garnered a review from Austin Clarke in the Irish Times of 14 February 1953. Stevens was notified of this by his friend John Sweeney, which was how he learned of Caton’s transgression. It at once stimulated the bibliophilic side of him; the supposed destruction of the print-run made him ‘all the more eager to have a copy’ (L 770), and he was delighted when Sweeney persuaded Clarke to dispatch across the Atlantic the one he had been sent to review. In a thank you letter of May 26 Stevens

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told the Irish poet: ‘I appreciate your courtesy more than I can tell you’ (qtd in Edelstein 100). ‘Grim, unlovable’ Caton died in 1971, taking with him to the grave most of the secrets of the Fortune Press. D’Arch Smith was one of the few ever granted access to his working premises, which seems to have resembled Krook’s rag and bottle shop in Bleak House: Parcels were piled to the ceiling, long flat ones of dust-jackets, thick heavy ones of bound books, packing-cases of sewn sheets, not only around the walls but almost solidly through the whole area of the room. The floor, the only really suitable place for loose papers, had been used for this purpose over the years so that a rich uneven wadding had formed over the concrete floor, firm and damp in some places, flimsy and brittle in others. Under a long working-bench on one side of the room Caton had regularly cast empty milk bottles, most of them unwashed, until they were packed solid. There was a desk facing the grimy barred window which gave on to the area, but its folding top and multitudinous pigeon-holes held such a mass of loose papers, keys, bottles of patent medicines, half-empty packets of cigarettes, that it seemed an extension of the general muddle and decay. (d’Arch Smith 32, see also 30–1) Moore too ended his days in a sea of papers. After his long hiatus he recovered much of his poetic fluency, though, alas, his work was routinely rejected by all major magazines and publishers. Riley first visited him at 89 Oakdene Road in 1984: The place seemed to be a total disaster, but acquaintance revealed this to be ‘organised squalor’. The living-room was like a miniature mountain landscape. There was a valley-like route for the wheelchair, with turningbays, from door to fireplace with a branch to the table and work-desk, through precipitous mounds of domestic substance – books, newspapers and magazines, records, papers, old chocolate and cigar boxes, seed packets, wine bottles and general detritus, most of it with something spilt over it and the whole under a coat of brown dust from a continually smouldering coke-fire. An aroma as of decayed perfume. Somewhere under these heaps were the furniture of the premises and about three thousand poems typed onto sheets of thin quarto paper. The windows were opaque with dirt and cracked here and there by the past activities of stone-throwing youthkult, for locally, which was vast homogeneous suburbia, he had at times developed the repute of an alien being, to be baited for no reason. (55) In these unpropitious circumstances he kept composing to the bitter end, even when so short-sighted he had to type with his nose an inch away from


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the keyboard. The first section of the poem on which he was at work at the time of his death, in January of 1986, beautifully translates the atmosphere of loving dialogue that he enjoyed with Priscilla, and which was so vital to his creativity in the forties, into a haunted, spectral hinterland from which poetry alone can salvage intimacy and understanding: When your ghost comes to me, I will tell you What it is that I now pursue, And whether it comes to any conclusion Or only to confusion; When your spirit Comes to me, I will tell you what I inherit From all the times we had, Good or bad. And when you complain of the chill and the boredom of death, I will try and give you breath, If only in these lines to pursue your passion And delight in the old fashion; So that at least, poor ghost, you’ll know what you pursued Has also been remembered, and understood. (‘Last Poem’, Lacrimae Rerum 60)

Notes 1. Seven ran for ten issues from 1938 to 1940. The first three issues were edited by Goodland and Moore, the last seven by Moore alone. The magazine’s address for issues 4 to 10 was his parents’ house in Cambridge, 86 Chesterton Road. All ten issues were reprinted in 1969 by Krauss Reprint (Nendeln, Liechtenstein). Contributors included Henry Miller, Hugh MacDiarmid, George Seferis, Richard Eberhart, Anne Ridler, Roy Fuller, George Barker, Norman MacCaig, David Gascoyne and Elizabeth Smart. 2. The anthology The New Apocalypse, edited by Hendry and Treece, was published in 1939 by the Fortune Press, and featured work by Nicholas Moore, though he never subscribed to the editors’ mythical, prophetic vision of poetry. However, Seven ran an admiring review of the volume by G. S. Fraser in Issue 8 (Spring 1940), and Goodland was a key figure in the movement’s inception. 3. See Atlantic Anthology, ed. Nicholas Moore and Douglas Newton (London: Fortune Press), 66–71. I am indebted for much of the information in this essay relating to Stevens’ negotiations with both his British and American publishers to Lensing and Edelstein (see Works Cited). 4. See Larkin’s introduction to a reissue of Jill in Required Writing (24–6). 5. The poem was written in 1939 and collected in Parts of a World, but then excluded from Stevens’ Collected Poems. Many of the tropes in Stevens’ poem

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6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

Stevens’ Afterlife in Europe are echoed in Moore’s sonnet sequence ‘Acrobats in a Red Spotlight’ (in Marnau et al. 25–35). Riley’s afterword appears in the second 1990 edition. The first edition of Spleen was co-published by Menard and Black Suede Boot Press in 1973. See ‘Tambi the Knife’, where Moore writes: ‘He [Knopf] had something against Tambi, I don’t know what’ (63), and a letter of Stevens to Moore of 20 July 1945: ‘Mr. Knopf, who is ordinarily an amiable sort of person, seems to be a little on edge about Tambimuttu. Just what this is all about I don’t know’ (qtd in Lensing 138). Opposite the title page this volume intriguingly advertises two books ‘in preparation’ by the same non-existent author – The Giant Mary (a long poem) and Leaves from the Diary of a Poet in Despair (poems). See, for instance, his ‘Poem for Billie Holiday’ in A Wish in Season (12) and his ‘Elegy for Four Jazz Players’ (who were Herschel Evans, Tommy Ladnier, Chu Berry and Dick Wilson) in The Glass Tower (96–9). The names he gave the products of his experiments in cross-breeding were often literary, and occasionally self-referential. One of his flyers advertises the Nicholas Moore Michaelmas Daisy as ‘rich bright violet, fine branching habit’. He in fact wrote to Stevens on 13 April 1955 soliciting a poem for this revamped version (Lensing 147–8). Stevens, who had only four months to live, was not well enough to oblige.

Works cited Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. 1954. Rpt London: Penguin, 1992. Auden, W. H. Collected Poems. London: Faber, 1976. Baudelaire, Charles. Selected Poems. Trans. and Ed. Joanna Richardson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Brazeau, Peter. Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered; An Oral Biography. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985. d’Arch Smith, Timothy. R. A. Caton and the Fortune Press. London: Bertram Rota, 1983. Edelstein, J. M. Wallace Stevens: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973. Jenkins, Lee Margaret. Wallace Stevens: Rage for Order. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2000. Larkin, Philip. Required Writing. London: Faber, 1983. Larkin, Philip. Selected Letters of Philip Larkin. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. London: Faber, 1992. Lensing, George S. ‘Wallace Stevens in England’. Wallace Stevens: A Celebration. Ed. Frank Doggett and Robert Buttel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 130–48. Marnau, Fred, Wrey Gardiner and Nicholas Moore. Three Poems. London: Grey Walls Press, 1944. Masel, Carolyn. ‘Stevens and England: A Difficult Crossing’. The Wallace Stevens Journal 25.2 (Fall 2001): 122–37. Moore, Nicholas. A Book for Priscilla. Cambridge: Epsilon Pamphlets, 1941. Moore, Nicholas. The Island and the Cattle. London: Fortune Press, 1941. Moore, Nicholas. A Wish in Season. London: Fortune Press, 1941. Moore, Nicholas. The Cabaret, the Dancer, the Gentleman. London: Fortune Press, 1942. (Abbreviated as CDG.)


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Moore, Nicholas. The Glass Tower. London: Editions Poetry London, 1944. (Abbreviated as GT.) Moore, Nicholas. ‘A Difficult Poem: “The Woman That Had More Babies Than That”’. Poetry London 10 (1944): 220–3. Moore, Nicholas. The War of the Little Jersey Cows. London: Fortune Press, 1945. (Under the pseudonym Guy Kelly.) Moore, Nicholas. Recollections of the Gala. London: Editions Poetry London, 1950. Moore, Nicholas. The Tall Bearded Iris. London: Collingridge, 1956. Moore, Nicholas. Lacrimae Rerum. Hebden Bridge: Poetical Histories + Open Township, 1988. Moore, Nicholas. ‘Tambi the Knife’. Tambimuttu: Bridge Between Two Worlds. Ed. Jane Williams. London: Peter Owen, 1989. Moore, Nicholas. Longings of the Acrobats: Selected Poems. Ed. Peter Riley. Manchester: Carcanet, 1990. Moore, Nicholas. Spleen. Second edn. London: Menard Press, 1990. Riley, Peter. ‘Afterword’. Spleen. By Nicholas Moore. Second edn. London: Menard Press, 1990. 55–8. Sinclair, Iain. Downriver. 1991. Rpt London: Vintage, 1995. Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. Tambimuttu: Bridge Between Two Worlds. Ed. Jane Williams. London: Peter Owen, 1989. Wordsworth, William. Selected Poems. Ed. John O. Hayden. London: Penguin, 1994.

12 A Ghost Never Exorcized: Stevens in the Poetry of Charles Tomlinson Gareth Reeves

It was not until the 1950s that Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams gained an appreciable audience in Britain, which is much longer than it took their Modernist American contemporaries Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot (the fact that London was the centre of operations for the two latter poets is of course relevant). Charles Tomlinson, one of the most ‘Americanized’ of the British poets to come to prominence in the 20 or so years following the Second World War, was instrumental in bringing Williams’ poetry to Britain. Less well known, however, is Tomlinson’s lifelong engagement with Stevens’ poetry. Tomlinson’s interest in twentieth-century American poetry is to do with the fact that he considers American poets to be generally more open to European poetry than are their English counterparts, and one reason for his fascination with Stevens is the latter’s French Symbolist inheritance. As Tomlinson describes in his book Some Americans: A Personal Record (1981), his first full-scale collection (Seeing Is Believing, 1958) was published in New York after most English publishers had rejected it (SA 13), and some feel Americans still take him to heart more readily than do the British. His relationship with American poetry is not easy to categorize, however. Most would agree with Alan Young’s assessment that Tomlinson’s poetry comes out of a productive tension between English and American, an ‘assimilation of some characteristics and qualities of American literary modernism to help shape a distinctively personal yet essentially English voice and vision’ (67). But if the role of American Modernism in Tomlinson’s poetry is generally recognized, less readily acknowledged is the extent to which his poetry is informed, indeed haunted, by the contradictions that are still being played out in the wake of that tradition. For this poet in ‘a state of mental emigration’ (SA 12), America has provided the imaginative space to explore his own aesthetic allegiances. Nowhere is this more evident than in the presence in his poetry of those two opposed representatives of American poetic Modernism, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Albert Gelpi has argued that Stevens and Williams, as representatives, respectively, of Symbolist and Imagist tendencies, enacted a dialectic central 186

Stevens in the Poetry of Charles Tomlinson

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to Modernist poetics. The Imagist Williams saw the work of art as assuming a place within nature, whereas the Symbolist Stevens was more concerned with the imagination’s power over external objects. This dialectic, which reflects ‘an ambiguity in the philosophic and linguistic assumptions of Modernism itself’, is ‘still unsettled’ (21). It is for this reason that Tomlinson’s career is both intriguing and representative, at any rate from a British point of view, for in his poetry that dialectic is unsettlingly present. The common view of Tomlinson, fostered by Tomlinson himself, is that an early, mistaken allegiance to Stevens gave way to a more fruitful reading of Williams. But the picture is less simple and more interesting, for one way of looking at Tomlinson’s poetic career is as an attempt to exorcize the ghost of Stevens. Tomlinson’s poetry demonstrates a Bloomian desire to suppress a strong Stevensian and Symbolist inclination towards an ‘interior’ poetry that ‘live[s] in the mind’ (CPP 728) in favour of a Williamsite and Imagist poetry of accurate perception. This chapter will discuss Tomlinson’s poetry and poetics in relation to Stevens. Not all of Tomlinson’s statements about Stevens should be taken at face value. In particular, the effect of Some Americans: A Personal Record is to downplay the part Stevens has played in his poetic development in favour of Williams. Tomlinson ‘muffed the thing badly’, he writes, in discovering Stevens before Williams. The implication of his account is that the kind of lesson he learned from Stevens he could have got more readily from Williams, namely an alertness to sensory perception, getting the ‘sharpness’ of ‘sense experience’ into his writing. This was perhaps inevitable, since at the time the only readily available collection of Stevens’ poems was Harmonium (lent him by ‘an American friend’) – Stevens’ English Selected Poems was not published until 1953, two years after the time Tomlinson is describing. Stevens’ ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, writes Tomlinson, ‘led me for a while to look from different angles at separate instances of the meticulous’ in poems (in his short collection, The Necklace, 1955) with titles like ‘Nine Variations in a Chinese Winter Setting’, ‘Eight Observations on the Nature of Eternity’ and ‘Suggestions for the Improvement of a Sunset’ (which contains the line ‘Six points of vantage provide us with six sunsets’) (SA 5, 9–10). Richard Swigg, in his book Charles Tomlinson and the Objective Tradition, follows Tomlinson’s cue by downplaying Stevens’ presence in Tomlinson’s poetry, implying that the British poet somehow outgrew the American: in Tomlinson’s poetry ‘[t]he human presence coexists with a changing world. But Tomlinson’s way of presenting the relation without diminishing the solidity of either shows how he increasingly differs from Stevens’ (44). Certainly this statement indicates the essential difference between the two poets. But, on the one hand, the difference has existed from the beginning of Tomlinson’s career, and, on the other, Tomlinson has continued to feel the pull of what he thinks of as his opposite. Throughout there has been a continual fascination with Stevens, who has always been an

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important participant in what Michael Edwards calls Tomlinson’s ‘passionate epistemological exploration’ (144). One can sense Stevens being warded off even where Tomlinson is more forthcoming than he is in Some Americans. In an interview with Ian Hamilton in 1964 he said, ‘It was a case of being haunted [by Stevens] rather than of cold imitation. I was also a painter and this meant that I had far more interest in the particulars of a landscape or an object than Stevens. Stevens rarely makes one see anything in detail for all his talk about a physical universe’ (83). And in his Author’s Preface to the 1966 reprint of The Necklace, Tomlinson regards some of the poems it contains as ‘both a dialogue with and a departure from’ Stevens: ‘Stevens’ sense of the complex relation of observer and environment fascinated me, but was there ever a poetry which stood so explicitly by a physical universe and against transcendence, but which gives so little account of that universe, its spaces, patterns, textures, “a world of canon and fugue”, such as Hopkins spoke of seeing before him.’ Stevens’ ‘supreme fiction’, according to this Preface, is symptomatic of a solipsism whereby reality is dependent on perception. Tomlinson, by contrast, wants a poetry that ‘accord[s] objects their own existence’ (5). That ‘dialogue with and departure from’ Stevens are clearly evident in the poem ‘The Art of Poetry’, which, as Tomlinson recalls in another interview (some 25 years after the poem’s publication in The Necklace), questions even as it echoes Stevens’ ‘The Snow Man’: ‘I was . . . arguing with one of my mentors and with a certain aspect of his elegance’ (qtd in Ross and Tomlinson 25): There must be nothing Superfluous, nothing which is not elegant And nothing which is if it is merely that. (TCP 11) These lines, says Tomlinson, are ‘a playful demur phrased after’ Stevens’ lines about the listener who ‘nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’ (CPP 8): I was worried that this kind of thing could lead to rather self-conscious writing, and Stevens himself didn’t always avoid that. In arguing for words to earn their keep, I was arguing for a kind of exactness in face of the object, which meant an exactness of feeling in the writer. It meant that you must enter into a relationship with things, that you must use your eyes and see what they were offering you – what, at first, you might not notice. (qtd in Ross and Tomlinson 25) But ‘enter[ing] into a relationship with things’ sounds like what Stevens thought he was doing when he explained in a letter, in somewhat abstract terms, that ‘The Snow Man’ is ‘an example of the necessity of identifying oneself with reality in order to understand it and enjoy it’ (L 464).


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The breathtaking achievement of the poem, which is in Stevens’ most persuasive ‘decreative’ mode, is the apprehension of a reality that is utterly un-anthropomorphic. The poem moves from despondency in emptiness to an exhilaration of self-voiding; it wins through to a delight in the realization of total otherness, of the not-me. Tomlinson’s account does not hear this, does not hear the poem’s rhetoric, its registering of the effort not, precisely, to indulge in ‘self-conscious’ imposition. That effort involves the syntax which unravels through the poem’s single extended sentence. In resisting the human tendency to anthropomorphize, the poetry finds itself, with haunting seduction, uttering the ‘sound’ it would ward off, conjuring the emotion it would repress. By such means the poem achieves Tomlinson’s desired ‘exactness of feeling in the writer’, even if the exactness is not that of descriptive accuracy ‘in face of the object’. That last phrase occurs in Stevens’ ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’, part XVIII of which begins: A dream (to call it a dream) in which I can believe, in face of the object, A dream no longer a dream, a thing, Of things as they are . . . (CPP 143) However conscious or otherwise of the quotation, in his account of ‘The Snow Man’ Tomlinson short-circuits Stevens’ argument, which is central not only to ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ but also to Stevens’ epistemology generally. The ‘dream’ is a Stevensian fiction, which, since it is credible, is no longer fiction but reality as perceived: ‘things as they are’. The dream is made credible by the feelings of the perceiver. Thus again the poem makes claims for an ‘exactness of feeling in the writer’, although by a more complex epistemology than Tomlinson is prepared to acknowledge in his account of ‘The Snow Man’. There is perhaps a programmatic refusal by Tomlinson here to meet Stevens on his own ground. The words of ‘The Snow Man’ do ‘earn their keep’: theirs is not superfluous elegance, but elegance that serves a purpose. The poem mimes an emotional progression by moving through and thus beyond that very self-consciousness of which Tomlinson accuses Stevens. The poem listens to, even relishes, its own sound in order to exorcize it, to resolve its cadence. If the writing is self-conscious, that is because the subject of the poem is the terror of self-consciousness. The poem shows what it feels like to achieve ‘a mind of winter’, a mind that in the end so abnegates the self as to achieve a triumphant stoicism which refuses to indulge despair. Stevens aims for ‘an exactness of feeling’ by resisting inexact ways of feeling. The resistance is audible in the poem’s haunting accumulation of negatives, culminating in the final phrase ‘the nothing that is’. Its way of ‘enter[ing] into a relationship with things’ is an engaged avoidance of a false relationship with things.

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The more ‘elegant’ the word-play, the more meaningful. Most significantly, the move from ‘nothing’ to ‘the nothing’ at the end is not elegance for elegance’s sake, but encapsulates the poem’s progression from despondency to affirmation. But for the astringent Tomlinson, Stevens’ style here conceals more than it reveals. In a poem called ‘Observation of Facts’, written about the same time as ‘The Art of Poetry’, he writes: ‘Style speaks what was seen, / Or it conceals the observation / Behind the observer: a voice / Wearing a ruff’ (TCP 12). Tomlinson evidently has Stevens in mind here. If for Tomlinson solipsism was Stevens’ temptation, then Tomlinson would resist it with due attention to all that is ‘bodied over against’ the ego (TCP 11). His theme is the way of perceiving and what is perceived, ‘relations and contraries’ between self and world (Tomlinson’s first pamphlet of poems was called Relations and Contraries). Calvin Bedient writes that The Necklace ‘zeroes in on [this] great Tomlinson theme, but vitiates it by a kind of enamelled elegance’ (21) – that very elegance of which Tomlinson accuses Stevens. And it is true that Tomlinson’s early poetry has a fastidiously elegant selfconsciousness which comes from the anxiety to shun ‘exaggeration’. The lines preceding the ones already quoted from ‘The Art of Poetry’ read: But how shall one say so? – The fact being, that when the truth is not good enough We exaggerate. Proportions Matter. It is difficult to get them right. (TCP 11) The ‘how’ of this ‘saying’ is self-consciously artful. The apparently throwaway phrase ‘the fact being’ gets highlighted in the context of a poem that is about the essential otherness, the ‘being’ of ‘facts’. The emphatic break, across stanza as well as line, in the two-word sentence ‘Proportions // Matter’ throws into relief the double sense of ‘matter’: what ‘matters’ is that we attend to the appearance of ‘matter’, how the phenomenal world exists in space and time. That sentence’s weight and balance are a verbal enactment of how, centrally for Tomlinson, getting things in ‘proportion’ involves the observing eye, seeing the right relationship between self and world. The act of perception involves proportion both moral and spatial, what Tomlinson calls ‘right feeling’ (SA 11). The nervous line-break between ‘nothing’ and ‘superfluous’ in the lines quoted earlier (‘There must be nothing / Superfluous’) negotiates between total absence and superfluity of presence, between lack of imagination and over-imagination – until the poem comes to rest, almost tranquilly, on its isolated, one-line statement of elegant descriptive fact, which by this time has been earned: ‘This green twilight has violet borders.’ The achievement of this observed fact gives the poet licence to conjure up a fleeting ‘elegance’, not quite a superfluity but not quite a nothing either, in the final four lines about the butterflies – which nevertheless are not held present


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longer than their dissolving vision allows, ‘Disappear[ing] as the evening appears’. That achievement, in its art of poetry, acts as a salve to the mind’s initial bruising: ‘At first, the mind feels bruised’ (TCP 10–11). A fascination with ‘Stevens’ sense of the complex relation of observer and environment’ involves Tomlinson’s insistence on self-definition and selflimitation. At about the time he was imitating Stevens’ ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ he was expressing his approval of how Crispin in ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ ‘did not attempt to lose identity in the ocean, but rather to allow himself to be changed by the experience of it – to see the world afresh rather than take off into the absolute’ (SA 11). Being changed by the experience of nature self-evidently has implications for the people who live in a landscape, as well as implications for the landscape itself. For Tomlinson, to see is to become. This epistemological fascination informs the ‘dialogue with and departure from’ Stevens’ ‘Thirteen Ways’ behind Tomlinson’s ‘Nine Variations in a Chinese Winter Setting’, a poem which also recalls Stevens’ remark that ‘[t]he proliferation of resemblances extends an object’ (CPP 691). Yet the fastidious manner of Tomlinson’s synaesthetic resemblances (flute music ‘counterpointing’ various images) is as anxious to confine likeness as to extend it; his ‘separate instances’ are more ‘meticulous’ than Stevens’. Both poems concern ‘mood’, how it is evoked and in what or whom it inheres. This is Stevens’ sixth way of looking at a blackbird: Icicles filled the long window With barbaric glass. The shadow of the blackbird Crossed it, to and fro. The mood Traced in the shadow An indecipherable cause. (CPP 75) Compare this with Tomlinson’s sixth variation, where the ‘mood’ is expressed in a fastidiously negative formulation which delimits as much as it likens (‘is not . . . as that’ is a way of putting it also found in variations IV and V): The outline of the water-dragon Is not embroidered with so intricate a thread As that with which the flute Defines the tangible borders of a mood. (TCP 4) Tomlinson’s poem wants the ‘borders’ of mood to be more ‘tangible’, more firmly fixed in the world of ‘spaces, patterns, textures’, less impressionistic, than Stevens’ ‘icicles’ and ‘barbaric glass’, the ‘cause’ of the mood more ‘decipherable’. ‘Defin[ing] the tangible borders of a mood’ is a locution that wants

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to resist imposing a mood, to locate feeling with ‘exactness in face of the object’. It confines emotion even as emotion is expressed – borders promise boundaries as well as prospects. Stevens’ ninth way of looking, on the other hand, promises an infinity of prospects, of imagined horizons: When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles. (CPP 76) No doubt for Tomlinson, Stevens’ poem is in danger here of ‘tak[ing] off into the absolute’. Yet the self-reflexivity of Stevens’ poetry makes Tomlinson’s ‘solipsist’ label too easy. Here is Stevens’ eighth way: I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know. (CPP 75–6) To know that the blackbird is involved in what you know is to know that, in the words of one of the ‘Adagia’, ‘The real is only the base. But it is the base’ (OP 187). On the other hand, ‘involved’ is a way of putting it that implicitly acknowledges the compromise entailed in this aesthetic. Reality is complicit in ‘what I know’, rather than clarified by the knowing. So knowing that things are involved in what you know has its solipsistic pain – but if that knowledge constitutes poetry (the ‘accents’ and ‘rhythms’), then poetry can be a means of discovering self in the world and is therefore an escape from solipsism. Stevens’ poetry is not merely of the mind, it is self-consciously of the mind. Its realities are things as they seem, because for him how they seem cannot be differentiated from ‘things as they are’, as we know from ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ (CPP 135). It may be that, in the words of Brian John, ‘Tomlinson recognized early that a Stevensian aesthetic’ entails ‘the solipsism of the self and that self’s need to deny the otherness of things’ (67), but ‘Thirteen Ways’ itself implicitly acknowledges the solipsistic dangers of which Tomlinson is so fearful. More enduring because less programmatic, more complex and deeply felt, more embedded in the poetry’s verbal texture, is the presence of Stevens in Tomlinson’s later work, by which time, according to Tomlinson’s account, the ghost of Stevens had been fully exorcized – although, as I shall argue, this is far from the case. The ‘antecedents’ of the poem-sequence ‘Antecedents: A Homage and Valediction’ (from Seeing Is Believing) belong to Stevens’ French


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Symbolist poetic inheritance – and the sequence culminates with an implicit acknowledgement of Stevens’ place at the end of that tradition. However strong the valedictory note sounded by this homage, it is informed by Tomlinson’s conviction that the important European poetic development of our times has moved to America. In an interview he argues that the thing about American poets is that they realize that they have simply got to read the poetry of other languages, they have simply got to read French poetry, whereas so many English poets are so pleased with the parish pump it doesn’t seem to concern them that they ought to know what happened in French Symbolism from, say, 1870 to round about 1920: from Rimbaud up to Valéry. All that phase interests me immensely, and I think it has obviously fed the American poets as well . . . (qtd in Orr 252) As one of the American poets fed by that phase, Stevens informs the dialogue and departure at the end of ‘Antecedents’, in the sixth poem of the sequence, ‘Something: A Direction’. The sequence progresses from a Symbolist solipsistic and interior dusk – ‘He bows to the looking-glass. Sunsets’ (‘II. Praeludium’; TCP 51) – to the possibility of an outer and actual sunset. The syntax of ‘Something: A Direction’ is driven by the prospect of what the poem calls ‘relation / With all that is other’. It begins: Out of the shut cell of that solitude there is One egress, past point of interrogation. Sun is, because it is not you; you are Since you are self, and self delimited Regarding sun. It downs? I claim? Cannot Beyond such speech as this, gather conviction? Judge, as you will, not what I say But what is, being said. It downs Recovered, coverless, in a shriven light And you, returning, may to a shriven self As from the scene, your self withdraws. (TCP 54) This reads as though it is one stage, or several stages, on from another poem about the sun, the last in Stevens’ Collected Poems, ‘Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself’. Stevens’ title represents desire rather than achievement. The poem recognizes the ‘egress’ but does not in the end get much beyond the ‘point of interrogation’. The poem’s waking consciousness begins by confusing exterior with interior world: ‘a scrawny cry from outside / Seemed like a sound in his mind’ (CPP 451). The self’s ‘shut cell’ is broken in upon by the dawning sun (‘The sun was rising at six’ [CPP 452]). But however much the poet resists metaphorical elaboration for the sun (‘No longer a battered

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panache above snow’), the fact that he repeatedly has to insist on its exteriority gives rise to doubts (‘It would have been outside’; ‘The sun was coming from outside’). Even the poem’s triumphant affirmation of ‘the colossal sun’ is downplayed by the tacked-on phrase ‘Still far away’. This is very much a poem of ‘preceding’ (‘A chorister whose c preceded the choir’) rather than of achievement. It concludes not with ‘new knowledge’ but with an approximation of it: ‘It was like / A new knowledge of reality’ (CPP 452; italics mine). In taking its ‘direction’ out of or away from Stevens, Tomlinson’s poem begins with an implicit reply to ‘Not Ideas About the Thing’. Tomlinson’s sun exists by reason of its being other than human consciousness; conversely, human consciousness exists by reason of its being other than the sun. For the poet the ‘relation / With all that is other’ takes the form of language, a matter intimated by the apparently stiff locution, ‘Regarding sun’. ‘Regarding’ is a kind of pun, meaning ‘as concerns the sun’ and also ‘when you look at the sun’. The pun raises the issue of language directly: ‘It downs? I claim? Cannot / Beyond such speech as this, gather conviction?’ The poem goes on to delineate the division between self and world, a division which, while maintaining you ‘at your proper bounds’, yet entails the knowledge of the pain of exclusion, an understanding of ‘the textures of your pain’. Out of this acknowledgement comes an ability to enter the (poetic) terrain anew, ‘a country, natural and profuse / Unbroken by past incursions’ (TCP 54). You are ‘released’ from your solipsistic ‘prison’, the ‘shut cell of that solitude’, into a ‘new-found’ neighbourhood now that you have ‘earned’ that ‘relation / With all that is other’. Both poem and sequence end in a state of suspended determination with a remarkable image for a kind of secular dying into a new life: Still you must wait, For evening’s ashen, like the slow fire Withdrawn through the whitened log Glinting through grain marks where the wood splits: Let be its being: the scene extends Not hope, but the urgency that hopes for means. (TCP 54–5) In misquoting Stevens’ poem ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’ here, Tomlinson characteristically both echoes and questions his mentor. ‘Let be its being’ is both like and unlike ‘Let be be finale of seem’ (CPP 50) in Stevens’ poem. ‘Still you must wait’: the waiting is attendant upon exploring the world that has been opened up by the sequence and by this poem, a world of ‘relations and contraries’ which is respected for its ‘otherness’, where ‘its being’ is ‘let be’. ‘Let be be finale of seem’ says the same sort of thing, but with a flourish – and that is the important difference, for ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’ implies


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that since mortality is commonplace, since it is, unremarkably, the absolute condition of existence, we should not be disconcerted by it, but should allow pleasure to govern the commonplace and everyday. In aesthetic terms this means that art and poetry are related to life in so far as they provide a diversion from it; their relation to existence is antithetical. The corpse is ‘cold’ and ‘dumb’, but meanwhile ‘The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream’ – said with an assertive flourish, twice. Tomlinson’s unflourishing version, ‘Let be its being’, asks that life’s mortal condition be allowed its full ‘being’ in the poetry, that it acquire a full presence there, as it does in the arresting but patiently attentive (rather than flourishing) image of the ‘whitened log’: a poetic demonstration of an ‘earned relation / With all that is other’. For Stevens poetry and art are compensation for the gap between self and world; for Tomlinson they are the way to bridge that gap. Thus, in Tomlinson’s poem ‘Cézanne at Aix’ the mountain of Cézanne’s painting is ‘a stone bridgehead / To that which is tangible’ (TCP 37). ‘Secular dying into a new life’: my phrase gestures at the numinous sense often felt at the end of a poem by Tomlinson, following on from an attentive contemplation of nature. And, significantly, it is in religious terms that Tomlinson came to think about Stevens, in a deeply considered essay, ‘Wallace Stevens and the Poetry of Scepticism’, which has not received the attention it deserves. Its year of publication, 1988, testifies to Tomlinson’s continuing interest in Stevens. The essay discusses Stevens in terms of a poet living in a secular age who hankers for spiritual certainty: ‘there is a loneliness in Stevens’s poetry which places him close to the European scepticism of Nietzsche’ (WSPS 399). In Tomlinson’s view this state of affairs has positive as well as negative consequences for Stevens’ poetry – and for the direction poets might take following him. On the one hand, at least Stevens’ example offers the possibility of fresh contact with the world, unlike the inventions of conventional religion: some of his poetry ‘finds a way of telling us that the fiction of the poem, by clearing a space for meaning and fresh apprehension, can reconcile us to a world of fact in a way that the fictions of religion no longer can’ (WSPS 397). On the other hand, ‘Stevens’s leanings towards religion’ (405) account for his notion of a ‘supreme fiction’, which, according to Tomlinson, is a backward-looking Arnoldian substitution of aesthetic for religious satisfaction. As Tomlinson reminds us, poetry as ‘the supreme fiction’ first appeared in the poem ‘A High-Toned Old Christian Woman’ (CPP 47), in which the poet ‘tells her that now the church has failed our imaginations, poetry must do the job for us’ (WSPS 397). The vacuum felt by the absence of religious belief (‘the intellectual and emotional need which resulted in [Stevens’ alleged] deathbed conversion to Catholicism’) was filled by the poet’s own imaginative structures: ‘In such a universe, nature reflects back at man the order his imagination has projected on it’ (400; this is about ‘Evening Without Angels’). To Tomlinson this situation is always a dangerously solipsistic

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state of affairs. In this context he refers to ‘old-fashioned romantic excess’ and states that one of Stevens’ most important themes, ‘the alliance of Death and Beauty’, ‘had been run ragged by romantics and decadents alike’ (394). However, being post-Romantic, Stevens ‘is self-conscious about his themes in a way romantics and decadents were not’ (394), a convincing observation, and one which is notably absent from Tomlinson’s earlier dealings with Stevens. But this self-consciousness elicits from Tomlinson in his ‘Poetry and Scepticism’ essay a curious blend of insight and myopia when responding to some of Stevens’ poetry. ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’, he argues, ironically ventriloquizes ‘the kind of middle-aged romantic poetry his uncle might have written’ (394). This is fairly said, but for Tomlinson the poem triumphs in spite of, not because of, its ironizing style. He quotes the second stanza: A red bird flies across the golden floor. It is a red bird that seeks out his choir Among the choirs of wind and wet and wing. A torrent will fall from him when he finds. Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing? I am a man of fortune greeting heirs; For it has come that thus I greet the spring. These choirs of welcome choir for me farewell. No spring can follow past meridian. Yet you persist with anecdotal bliss To make believe a starry connaissance. (CPP 11) Tomlinson then comments: ‘To the apparently stale topic and into the apparently unusable idiom Stevens brings new life, an awareness of nature that is fresh and individual in this evocation of wet woods, the sounding of bird-song through wind and rain’ (WSPS 395). Tomlinson’s is a way of commenting that wants to be deaf to the self-reflexivity of Stevens’ medium. There is an element of wish-fulfilment in Tomlinson’s response: here, he feels, is one of those rare occasions when Stevens makes the reader ‘see’ something. But even the lines about the red bird are more abstract and removed from their subject than this praise for a fresh ‘awareness of nature’ acknowledges. How does the speaker ‘uncrumple this much-crumpled thing’, the well-worn subject of spring’s awakening and its attendant angst? ‘For it has come that thus I greet the spring’ alerts the reader to the way of greeting, where ‘red’ against ‘golden’ takes on an emblematic air, and where ‘floor’ and ‘choir’ conjure up an amphitheatre of the imagination more than they do ‘new life’. This writing is closer to Yeatsian dancing floors than to a fresh awareness of nature. That said, it is clear that, however affecting Tomlinson finds what he takes to be Stevens’ poetic ‘evocation’, this is not enough for Tomlinson’s own


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‘passionate epistemology’ (in those words by Michael Edwards), his desire for poetry to cleave close to cognition. For Tomlinson in this essay, Stevens has a ‘power of sensuous evocation’, but he lacks ‘the sensuous particularizing of shapes and substances of the kind one finds in (say) Hopkins’ (WSPS 395) – and note once more the contrast with Hopkins. Stevens is above all for Tomlinson a preparation for the sort of poetry he, Tomlinson, would write: ‘Stevens’s conviction that “The great poem of earth remains to be written” does not quite carry him sufficiently far to write it’ (397). If, for Tomlinson, Stevens represents the culmination of Romanticism’s solipsistic cul-de-sac, he also pointed the way out, even if he could not quite take it himself. Thus, Tomlinson is most convinced by the poems of Stevens that ‘clear a space’, less so by those that try to fill that space: ‘Stevens is a poet whose imagination warms to the cold. He wanted to write a “poetry of earth” and to be the poet of “a physical universe”, praising “total satisfaction, the moment of total summer”. Yet “total summer” seems to yield little but rhetoric to Stevens’s wintry temperament’ (396). In this Tomlinson is following Yvor Winters, to whom his essay appeals on several occasions, the Winters who praised such poems as ‘The Snow Man’ and ‘The Course of a Particular’, but dismissed as hedonist poems such as ‘Credences of Summer’. When the latter poem insists, ‘Let’s see the very thing and nothing else. / Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight’ (CPP 322), Tomlinson would complain that this is merely voicing a desire to see, not doing the seeing. But the thrust of the essay is sympathy for someone whom Tomlinson sees as a figure of spiritual desolation and desire. He describes as ‘acute’ but ‘harsh’ Helen Vendler’s comment on ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ in her book On Extended Wings: ‘“Stevens’ self seems to have presented him with a world excessively interior, in which the senses, with the exception of the eye, are atrophied or impoverished”’ (WSPS 403). Tomlinson takes the force of ‘excessively interior’, but stresses the lack of ‘impoverishment’ in the lines about the woman singing beside the sea: And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. (CPP 106) But, significantly, Tomlinson wants to hear in the poem a suspicion of its own imaginative inventiveness: ‘His words, like her notes, spilling out over nature or “reality”, annex it to human needs. Here her music virtually compels it into ordered significance. Yet, curiously, Stevens himself stands apart with “pale Ramon”, as if he cannot quite believe in the woman’s opulent solipsism’ (WSPS 404). Thus, in spite of Tomlinson’s habitually reiterated suspicion of Stevens’ latter-day Romantic ego, what in this essay he calls ‘the lyric accord’ (ibid.), he is anxious to credit Stevens with a similar wariness – even if there

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is a degree of wish-fulfilment in Tomlinson’s reaction here to ‘The Idea of Order’, for the last lines acknowledge that the woman’s song has temporarily transformed not only her apprehension of the world, but the poet’s as well. Evidently, this particular dialogue with Stevens had started some 20 or so years earlier, in Tomlinson’s less opulently phrased poem ‘The Hill’ (American Scenes and Other Poems, 1966), where, as in ‘The Idea of Order’, the poet observes a woman in a landscape while addressing a third person, thus allowing a similarly distanced, assessing perspective. Like Stevens in his poem, Tomlinson sets up an interrogatory relationship between poet and woman, though withholding the lyric expansiveness of this sort of Stevensian questioning: Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew It was the spirit that we sought and knew That we should ask this often as she sang. (CPP 105) ‘The Hill’ begins with its rather different kind of questioning: Do not call to her there, but let her go bearing our question in her climb: what does she confer on the hill, the hill on her? (TCP 114) The poem goes on to delineate this mutual dependence and independence of woman and landscape, the ‘contraries’ as well as the ‘relations’, and ends with words that sound like a deliberate dialogue with and departure from Stevens: So, do not call to her there: let her go on, whom the early sun is climbing up with to the hill’s crown – she, who did not make it, yet can make the sun go down by coming down. (TCP 114) These lines playfully resist the ‘opulent solipsism’ of the woman in ‘The Idea of Order’. A punning play on the first ‘make’ (‘she did not make it to the summit’, and ‘she did not create the sun’) introduces a playful, complimentary hyperbole centred on the second ‘make’ (she ‘can make / the sun go down’, that is, ‘she can outshine the sun’). This calls to mind, even as it wards off, Stevens’ ‘she was the maker’, the Stevensian notion that, in Tomlinson’s


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words about ‘The Idea of Order’, the woman ‘compels [nature] into ordered significance’. If that possibility is allowed in Tomlinson’s poem, it is also tonally qualified. For Tomlinson, the relationship between nature and art is a constant ‘negotiation’, not an antithesis, neither a ‘supreme fiction’ nor a ‘rage for order’. ‘Nature is hard’, this poem says, ‘but, held on the giant palm, one may negotiate / and she, rising athwart it, is showing the art’ (TCP 114). Part of that negotiation here is the anthropomorphic vision of the hill as a ‘giant palm’: a bold metaphor, but one that does not stray far from the physically and visually present. In the ‘Poetry of Scepticism’ essay, then, Tomlinson likes the poetry by Stevens where ‘there is a resistance involved’ (to quote Stevens’ ‘The Course of a Particular’ [CPP 460]), where ‘interiority’ acknowledges its opposite. He approves of the fact that in ‘Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself’ the ‘world excessively interior’ ‘is once more beset from beyond itself’, as he puts it (404). And he welcomes the poems at the end of Stevens’ career which, instead of striving to create a myth, are content to rest in their own uncertainty, poems such as ‘The World as Meditation’, which demonstrates a Keatsian ‘negative capability’, ‘a scepticism that nourishes rather than undermines’ (408). But for all that, Stevens represents the end of a line for Tomlinson, who sums up: His hope was that [the supreme fiction] was a mask of the real. But so often the real seemed illusively distant and difficult to situate within the body of the universe. . . . Stevens is a poet of evocations rather than patterned inscapes. He hovers above and about his subjects rather than entering into their life co-extensive with his own. ‘The American Sublime’ may complain of ‘The empty spirit / In vacant space’, yet no square inch of American space is really empty or unpatterned. Desert or forest will both give back to the eye enough particulars to nourish and sustain if the demands of subjectivity are not exorbitant. (WSPS 405) These sentences provide an instructive way into Tomlinson’s ‘Swimming Chenango Lake’, a poem with a markedly American – a Native American – title and setting. Despite this poem’s awareness that it constitutes a ‘new knowledge of reality’, in which knower and known are in a perpetually altering relationship, it impressively succeeds in situating itself ‘within the body of the universe’. For all its epistemological knowingness, it maintains a physical precision, ‘give[s] back to the eye enough particulars’ to conjure the actual. Although the poem intimates the possibility of infinite readings and countless ways of ‘looking’ (‘He reads the water’s autumnal hesitations / A wealth of ways’ [TCP 155]), and although therefore the poem is necessarily a partial reading, excluding as well as including (‘There is a geometry of water, for

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this / Squares off the clouds’ redundances’ [ibid.]) – although all this is so, the poem works deliberately, ostentatiously even, for its Hopkinsian ‘patterned inscapes’. Stevens’ poetry invariably knows that ‘It Must Change’ (CPP 336); but Tomlinson’s would find that apprehension embodied: It is a geometry and not A fantasia of distorting forms, but each Liquid variation answerable to the theme It makes away from, plays before. (TCP 155) The ‘play’ with which the musical metaphor is here elaborated signifies poetic deliberation, where the phrase ‘liquid variation’ brings together concept and physical description (though some may feel that the poet overplays the deliberation with the insistent abstraction of such words as ‘theme’). If Stevens ‘hovers above and about his subjects rather than entering into their life co-extensive with his own’, the protagonist of ‘Swimming Chenango Lake’ does not remain hovering above and about for long, but takes the plunge in order (punningly) to ‘grasp’ and be grasped by its meaning, to realize his ‘dependence’ (another pun) on what he sees, that to define one’s environment is to define the self: But he has looked long enough, and now Body must recall the eye to its dependence As he scissors the waterscape apart And sways it to tatters. Its coldness Holding him to itself, he grants the grasp, For to swim is also to take hold On water’s meaning, to move in its embrace And to be, between grasp and grasping, free. (TCP 155) The poem registers – as Tomlinson acknowledges ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ likewise registers – that this is a temporary accommodation between self and world, that there is a time to apprehend (to grasp), and a time to let go, which is the note on which the poem ends. ‘[A] geometry of water’ at the start has, by the end, given way to a mere mosaic of tiny shatterings, Where a wind is unscaping all images in the flowing obsidian, The going-elsewhere of ripples incessantly shaping. (TCP 156) Here the poem unmakes itself, ‘unscaping’ its achieved ‘images’ (‘unscaping’ significantly inverting those Hopkinsian ‘inscapes’), as the world goes on its


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way, ‘incessantly shaping’ itself in a continuum that goes elsewhere, leaving poem and poet behind. One way of responding to ‘Swimming Chenango Lake’ is as a counter to the bleak Stevensian scepticism and lonely disbelief Tomlinson finds in ‘Sunday Morning’. In the ‘Poetry of Scepticism’ essay, in a reading much influenced by Winters, Tomlinson argues that ‘Sunday Morning’ ends on a note of ‘unappeasing tragedy’ (398) because it remains unconvinced by the myth it has presented as an alternative to moribund Christianity: And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings. (CPP 56) ‘This world drifts on’, writes Tomlinson, ‘with no divinely sanctioned purpose, through space, an “island solitude”, and the poem with its “casual flocks of pigeons” enacts the movement “downward to darkness” and annihilation’ (WSPS 399) – although ‘annihilation’ is an unwarrantably bleak reading of Stevens’ final phrase, ‘on extended wings’, for the emotions elicited are more ‘ambiguous’ than that, his lines posing and poising their opposites in an impressive rhetorical balance: ‘wings’ balances ‘sink’; ‘extended’ balances ‘downward’; and ‘casual’ is poised with and against the rhetorical symmetry of these lines. Be that as it may, ‘Swimming Chenango Lake’ sounds as if it would answer the close of ‘Sunday Morning’ – or at any rate Tomlinson’s sense of it: The image he has torn Flows-to [sic] behind him, healing itself, Lifting and lengthening, splayed like the feathers Down an immense wing whose darkening spread Shadows his solitariness: alone, he is unnamed By this baptism, where only Chenango bears a name In a lost language he begins to construe . . . (TCP 155) Stevens’ wings of darkness are present here, not as an image of existential solitude, but as part of a process of transformation, of searching, knowing and defining. The poetry embodies a condition of perpetual change. For Tomlinson, ‘Sunday Morning’ laments the passing of an old dispensation, an outmoded system of belief, only to fall back on a reality without meaning, ‘an old chaos of the sun’. But ‘Swimming Chenango Lake’ welcomes a new dispensation, in which a condition of ignorance is the perpetual potential for renewed apprehension. The new dispensation is intimated in the

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reverse ‘baptism’ of ‘unnaming’. The perpetual definings and redefinings of language, of poetry, should be at one with the perpetual transformation, the continual process, which is ‘the great poem of the earth’. In its characteristic merging of abstract and concrete, mental and physical, the diction of ‘Swimming Chenango Lake’ intimates that identity can only be sought in relationship with the world: A speech of densities and derisions, of halfReplies to the questions his body must frame Frogwise across the all but penetrable element. (TCP 155) ‘[D]ensities’ conjures up the element water, ‘derisions’ somehow keeps it at bay. ‘Penetration’, like ‘grasping’, can be mental as well as physical. But the poem cleaves to its element: sensation rather than evocation – ‘unappeasing’ adventure, not tragedy. And the adventure of sensation is continuous and ever-changing: ‘The going-elsewhere of ripples incessantly shaping’ – where the phrase ‘the going-elsewhere’ impressively combines abstract and physical, description and action, noun and verb, perception and phenomenon. Tomlinson’s most characteristic poetry wants to capture a moment of contemplation in the ceaseless going-elsewhere, the ‘wave, interminably flowing’ (from Stevens’ ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’ [CPP 74], quoted approvingly by Tomlinson in ‘The Poetry of Scepticism’), which is Being. However, perhaps this is to take him too much at his own word. For a contemplative like Tomlinson, only art can capture the ceaseless going-elsewhere – and so, however much he wants to write the poetry of earth, poetry will always be of the mind. This is the paradox described by Calvin Bedient: Despite his animadversions against Romanticism, Tomlinson has shown himself quite ready to think of art . . . as a spiritual flowering beyond anything offered by reality. . . . Let [the poems] set nature before us as a sufficient spiritual end; still, their very existence as poetry, their very excess over nature, suggests that it is art, and not nature, that cures the ache of being. (20) Hence it is that, in Bedient’s words, Tomlinson’s ‘painstaking descriptions’ are ‘so often hard to seize with the eye’ (22) – a curious paradox indeed. Moreover, there is considerable irony in the fact that Bedient’s response to Tomlinson accords with Tomlinson’s to Stevens, although Stevens’ poetics never sets as much store by a Hopkinsian hæcceity (Hopkins’ term, derived from Duns Scotus, for ‘thisness’) as does Tomlinson’s. But for all the insistence of Tomlinson’s poetics on exteriority, his poetic ‘descriptions’ are interior


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worlds: landscape becomes mindscape by the act of poetic encompassing. Often the poems glut with their pictorial excess, their worrying away at visual precision, their moments of perceptual alteration. The poem ‘Clouds’, for instance, is by turns concerned with and consoled by the fact that the dreamer-poet cannot ‘fix’ the miracle of cloudscape. Yet are we not more beguiled by the poem as dreamscape, as ‘the image of an interiority’ (to quote Tomlinson on Stevens’ ‘The World as Meditation’), than by the implicit, Wordsworthian, injunction at the end that ‘the dreamer [should] wak[e] to the categorical call’ of ‘a common day’ (TCP 170)? It is an entrancing poem about nothing – or, to put it another way, about a state of mind. The ghost of Stevens is never exorcized.

Works cited Bedient, Calvin. Eight Contemporary Poets. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. Edwards, Michael. ‘The Poetry of Charles Tomlinson’. Charles Tomlinson: Man and Artist. Ed. Kathleen O’Gorman. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988. 136–52. Gelpi, Albert. ‘Stevens and Williams: The Epistemology of Modernism’. Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism. Ed. Albert Gelpi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 3–23. Hamilton, Ian. ‘Four Conversations’. London Magazine 4 (Nov. 1964): 64–85. John, Brian. The World as Event: The Poetry of Charles Tomlinson. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1989. Orr, Peter. ‘Charles Tomlinson’. The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets Conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press and Ian Scott-Kilvert. Gen. ed. Peter Orr. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. 250–5. Ross, Alan and Charles Tomlinson. ‘Words and Water, an Interview’. Charles Tomlinson: Man and Artist. Ed. Kathleen O’Gorman. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988. 21–37. Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966. Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous. Ed. Milton J. Bates. New York: Knopf, 1989. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. Swigg, Richard. Charles Tomlinson and the Objective Tradition. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1994. Tomlinson, Charles. The Necklace. Swinford: Fantasy Press, 1955. Reissued with an Introduction by Donald Davie. London: Oxford University Press, 1966. Tomlinson, Charles. Some Americans: A Personal Record. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981. (Abbreviated as SA.) Tomlinson, Charles. Collected Poems. 1985. Enlarged edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. (Abbreviated as TCP.) Tomlinson, Charles. ‘Wallace Stevens and the Poetry of Scepticism’. The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. Ed. Boris Ford. Vol. 9: American Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. 393–409. (Abbreviated as WSPS.) Vendler, Helen Hennessy. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. Young, Alan. ‘Rooted Horizon: Charles Tomlinson and American Modernism’. Critical Quarterly 24 (Winter 1982): 67–73.

13 A Poetics of Ignorance: António Ramos Rosa and Wallace Stevens Irene Ramalho Santos

You must become an ignorant man again Wallace Stevens . . . que os poetas podem compreender o mundo sem conceitos (. . . that poets can understand the world without concepts) Manoel de Barros Estão na moda os círculos ignorantes que só aceitam membros com certificado de ignorância (Ignorant circles are in style only members holding a certificate of ignorance are accepted) Boaventura de Sousa Santos I was probably the first person to write about António Ramos Rosa (1924–) in English (in Portugal or elsewhere). In the late 1970s, I started writing brief reviews of contemporary Portuguese literature for World Literature Today. The first of these reviews came out in the winter issue of 1979. The book reviewed was A palavra e o lugar (The Word and the Place), a selection of Ramos Rosa’s poetry from books published between 1960 and 1977. In those days, newly returned to Portugal after a PhD earned at Yale with a dissertation on Wallace Stevens under the supervision of Harold Bloom, I kept hearing echoes of Stevens in every contemporary poet that impressed me. Ramos Rosa was no exception. My wording in that first review, woven from scraps of my own translations of lines, or fragments of lines, of Ramos Rosa’s poetry, reverberated with Stevens’ images, concepts and figurations. Ramos Rosa’s poetry struck me both as a poetry of words and a poetry of ideas, and it was peopled with what immediately appeared to me as Stevensian rocks, green leaves, 204

António Ramos Rosa and Stevens

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lamps, fires, houses, spaces, places-not-our-own and places-made-ours by the poet’s words, poverty, whiteness, deserts, absences, repetitions, wide waters, fertile barrenness, the speech of the mortal tongue and the innocence of fresh beginnings. Above all, the inconceivable, perceivable truth of the sun, so powerful in Stevens’ poetry and poetics, kept overflowing from Ramos Rosa’s poems as well. I had not yet met the Portuguese poet personally, and I wrote cautiously. I never mentioned the word ‘influence’, although a passage from ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ was used as the epigraph in A construção do corpo (The Construction of the Body) as early as 1969: ‘From this the poem springs: that we live in a place / That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves’ (CPP 332). I spoke then, as I still like to do, of ‘constellations of poets’. I was sure from the very beginning that, by the way they both conceived of poetry, Ramos Rosa and Stevens were stars in one constellation. Possibly, Ramos Rosa never had the opportunity to read ‘July Mountain’, but he would no doubt agree that ‘We live in a constellation / Of patches and of pitches, / Not in a single world’ (CPP 476).1 Today, I am more than vindicated in my ‘constellation’ approach to poetry and poets by Ramos Rosa’s recently published sequence of poems entitled ‘Constelações’. The first line of the sequence reads as follows: ‘O mundo não é o mundo sem a cintilante caligrafia das constelações’ (‘The world is not the world without the scintillating calligraphy of the constellations’ [Génese 57]). My aim is not to sketch here a theory of influence, if for nothing else because poetry is always what I like to call posterous. But I do wish to show a brilliant constellation of poets, which, briefly including the Brazilian Manoel de Barros and O livro das ignorãças, may at least start us thinking on a Transatlantic theory of poetry-as-ignorance. When I sent Ramos Rosa a copy of my very first review of his poetry, I was prepared to hear from him what he had already said of another of his epigraphs taken from another poet: that the two lines from ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ presiding over A construção do corpo summed up all he knew of Stevens’ poetry. But he did not say that. The Francophile Portuguese poet acknowledged his admiration for the poetry of Wallace Stevens, a Francophile of sorts himself, at the same time that he vehemently denied being ‘influenced’ by the American Modernist poet. His major affinities, explained Ramos Rosa, whose English is not as good as his French or Spanish, lay rather with poetry written in Portuguese, French or Spanish. In the years that followed, I went on writing about Ramos Rosa and Stevens separately, but each one of them kept haunting my writing on the other. It was clear to me that, for both poets, poetry was, or aspired to be, the experience of the fullness of being – the poem as ‘pure reality’, as in ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ (CPP 402) – a kind of concept-less ur-knowledge, like Heidegger’s bringing to presence by physically grasping (greifen) (see Basic Writings 380-1 and Was heisst Denken?). The way to this knowledge is what Ramos Rosa calls ‘interrogação do real’ (‘asking about the real and the real as

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a question mark’), a probing gesture of amazed interpellation of the ‘thereis’ (es gibt), which actively and reciprocally involves subject and object (or reality and the imagination, in Stevensian terms; see Ramos Rosa’s A poesia moderna). ‘Poetry must be irrational’, says Stevens in one of his ‘Adagia’ (OP 188), a conception he brings to a finer tone in ‘Notes’ by resorting to the notion of ‘a later reason’ (CPP 345, 346). ‘The poem’, we remember, ‘must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully’ (CPP 306, my emphasis). In ‘Man Carrying Thing’, the poem, written after ‘Notes’, from which I have just quoted, ‘thoughts’, forcefully ‘endure[d]’ in the ‘night’, give way to the luminous clarity of the ‘bright obvious’. No wonder ‘[t]he poem reveals itself only to the ignorant man’ (OP 187). Stevens’ most striking metaphor for the fullness of this knowing sense, which is paradoxically an unknowing – indeed, I would say, it is the originary ‘discovery of thought’ of another Stevens poem (CPP 459) – is ‘the knowledge of squirrels’ in ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ (CPP 416). Similarly, in a poem of Ramos Rosa’s O incêndio dos aspectos (The Fire of Aspects), we learn that we have to forget ‘the tower of knowledge’ in order ‘merely’ to ‘know’ (17). Only the solid materiality of poetic language (der feste Buchstabe is Hölderlin’s suggestive wording in ‘Patmos’) accomplishes this knowing. Any investigation into Stevens’ place in European letters would definitely require a visit to António Ramos Rosa. Reading Stevens and Ramos Rosa together makes me even more aware of the resistance of the strongest Western poetry to its colonization by philosophy. I have in mind, in particular, Plato’s famous indictment in Book X of The Republic (poets are mere imitators of virtue and, therefore, never reach the truth), as well as Hegel’s dismissive reduction many centuries later. In his Introduction to Aesthetics, Hegel proclaims art a thing of the past (ein Vergangenes). All we can do in modernity, he says, is engage in discourse about art (that is, criticism). And that is, in fact, Hegel reassures us, all we need: knowledge, philosophy, science – or criticism (Hegel’s concept is Wissenschaft; see Einleitung in die Ästhetik 31–1 and Introduction to Aesthetics 11). Heidegger’s thinking on poetry is, to a large extent, a response to Hegel’s disparagement. Countering Hegel, Heidegger suggests that the ‘thing’ that in poetry is ‘there’ sensuously, halfway between thought and materiality, is language, for language-as-tongue (body) is what poetry is all about: ‘Language alone brings the being as a being (das Seiende als ein Seiendes) into the open for the first time . . . Language itself is poetry in the essential sense (im wesentlichen Sinne)’ (Basic Writings 198–9 [translation slightly changed]; Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes 85). In Stevens and Ramos Rosa, I encounter this kind of Heideggerian materiality of thinking made luminously present: thinking become thinging, as it were, the sensuous knowing that precedes the Platonic distinction between poetry and philosophy, and actually inverts the Hegelian hierarchy. Judging from the importance given to criticism, to the detriment of poetry, in our time, the philosopher may have a point.


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True poets, however (or, as Harold Bloom would say, ‘strong poets’), do not agree at all, and many philosophers join them in their disagreement.2 In ‘The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet’ Stevens compares poetry to philosophy to conclude that poetry is not philosophy, and ‘may be its superior’ (CPP 668). In Ramos Rosa’s theoretical essays, the approach is similar to that of Stevens. The poet dispenses with the ‘crutches of conceptual discourse’, Ramos Rosa writes in Poesia, liberdade livre (Poetry, Free Freedom [11]); poetry is the freest ‘rupture’ (I would say, ‘interruption’) of the order of logical reason, the poet insists, with Rimbaud in mind, in A poesia moderna e a interrogação do real – I (15–16). In another essay, also included in the earlier collection, Poesia, liberdade livre, Ramos Rosa, reflecting on the relationship between ‘logical reason’ and ‘poetic sense’, concludes that, even though it is not essentially ‘anti-logical’, the poetic process both precedes and transcends logic (31). Stevens, in turn, also believes that poetry must satisfy ‘both the reason and the imagination’ (CPP 668). In ‘Notes’, he calls this superseding gesture, whereby ‘poetic truth’ emerges as ‘factual truth’ (CPP 680), a ‘later reason’ (CPP 345, 346). Even though he claims he has not been influenced by Stevens, Ramos Rosa, one of the most distinguished contemporary Portuguese poets, acknowledges having read and admired the American Modernist’s poetry. This is important in a poet who, after Maurice Blanchot, describes himself as basically a reader: ‘como ensaísta, sou essencialmente um leitor de poesia e, como poeta, sou ainda um leitor de poesia’ (‘as an essayist, I am essentially a reader and, as a poet, what I really am is still a reader of poetry’ [‘A leitura de um livro’ 233–4]). I quote from a fairly recent brief sketch inspired by a younger poet’s work, but the concept has been there from very early on. If, according to Ramos Rosa, reading is what poetry writing is all about, and if Ramos Rosa reads, has read Stevens, then I am emboldened to hear him reading Stevens as I hear him writing his poetry. This is not to say that, in my thus ‘close listening’ (Charles Bernstein), I shall be looking for echoes of Stevens in Ramos Rosa’s poetry. But I will certainly be paying attention to the astral influence, and possible disasters, that preside over the creativity of both poets. Beyond the parallels that I observe in their work, I have always been fascinated as well by the apparent contrast (although I will not be examining it here in any depth) between Ramos Rosa’s delicate yet intense sensuousness of language (a language that is clearly a tongue in the mouth)3 and the whimsical distance of Stevens’ seemingly colder and more austere mode. I stress seemingly. Back in the late 1970s, a poem in Ramos Rosa’s A palavra e o lugar struck me as particularly Stevensian. The title of the poem, ‘Antes do poema’ (‘Before the Poem’), which had first appeared in a slender collection entitled Boca incompleta (Incomplete Mouth), the poem’s insistence on absence and the invisible white, on naked nakedness and the null, nothingness and the fecund desert, the repetition of difference, the incompleteness of the mouth, the absent mouth and the fiction of beginnings – everything reverberated for me with Stevens’ first idea and the absence of the imagination that had itself to be

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imagined as ‘an inevitable knowledge’ (CPP 428). Writing a year later about another Ramos Rosa collection – As marcas no deserto (The Tracks in the Desert) – I suggested (again, without speaking of influence, let alone of its anxiety) that Ramos Rosa, like Stevens, believed in poeming, not exactly out of nothing, but out of the accumulated fragility and vulnerability of human remembering of that which lies before memory (and history). To discover and not to impose is the American poet’s aim in ‘Notes’ (CPP 349). In As marcas no deserto, the Portuguese poet writes against the desert, in every sense of the word against, a desert that is as crucial a concept for him there as the provisional abstractness of the first idea is for Stevens. In the manner of Stevens as well, creation, for Ramos Rosa, implies decreation. This is what O incêndio dos aspectos is all about. Fire, in Ramos Rosa as in Stevens, is associated with consumption and destruction, but also with purification (I shall come back to this image). The sun as both a destructive and creative power is what makes it the adequate symbol of poetry (Phoebus Apollo). Poem no. 2 of O incêndio dos aspectos contrasts loss and exuberance, blue and green, black and red, elastic body and body parts, image and wound, only to close with four lines that sound like an exhilarating version of, or perhaps rather, defiant response to Stevens’ ‘Gubbinal’ in Harmonium. Here is the last stanza of Ramos Rosa’s poem: ‘que rasgam os membros da matéria / nunca usada e não virgem e branca / elástico animal exuberante ardente / e grande e belo como o sol no seio’ (‘that tear the limbs of matter / never used and not virginal and white / elastic animal exuberant ardent / and large and beautiful like the sun in the breast’). I almost translated ‘seio’ (breast; bosom) as ‘seed’, as it appears in ‘Gubbinal’. Here is that strange ‘Gubbinal’: That strange flower, the sun, Is just what you say. Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad. That tuft of jungle feathers, That animal eye, Is just what you say. That savage of fire, That seed, Have it your way. The world is ugly, And the people are sad. (CPP 69)


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The two poems, Stevens’ and Ramos Rosa’s, are totally different, of course, one celebratory, the other verging on the parodic, and if there is a foreign ‘influence’ behind O incêndio dos aspectos, Ramos Rosa had already mentioned the name of Salah Stétié, the French-speaking Lebanese poet, whose language of ruptures and contradictions, Ramos Rosa once admitted, inspired him in this collection. Ramos Rosa’s poem is a passionate celebration of the rage for life, whose wording sensuously causes the appearance of the palpable body of a naked and highly sexualized woman carrying the gorgeous sun in her breasts. On the other hand, Stevens’ poem depicts a kind of wry disenchantment with life by invoking the sun in derogation (no less in the made-up ‘gubbinal’ of the title), a derogation further emphasized by the heavy sensuality of the ‘tuft of jungle feathers’. And yet, the two poems are uncannily mutually resonant. It is as if Stevens had to write his poem apotropaically debunking the sun as a strange flower, animal eye, savage of fire or seed, suggesting its strong potential but also its aleatory susceptibility (‘Is just what you say’, ‘Have it your way’), but only so that Ramos Rosa could make the luxuriant woman that embodies his song coincide, like a muse, with the very source of poetry in the tradition: the resplendent sun. In 1988, the somewhat loose association I had been making between the poetry and poetics of António Ramos Rosa and Wallace Stevens gained a new dimension. Ramos Rosa’s O livro da ignorância (The Book of Ignorance) came out in Ponta Delgada, Azores.4 Elsewhere, I wrote of O livro da ignorância in conjunction with other Ramos Rosa publications of the late 1980s, showing how his work up to then was a series of gestures to fulfil the erotic/poetic programme formulated by Pessoa/Caeiro in 1915 as the ultra-pastoral desire to bite into the earth and find a flavour in it (‘Se eu pudesse trincar a terra toda / E sentir-lhe um paladar’ [150]).5 I spoke then of António Ramos Rosa’s ‘happy poetry’, eloquently expressed in the ‘green coincidence’ of Volante verde (Green Steering Wheel). O livro da ignorância added explicitly a concern (and a concept) that had emerged as early, at least, as O incêndio dos aspectos. In poem 37 of this remarkable sequence of fiery lyrics, we hear of the ‘cruel ignorance enclosing the word’ (‘a cruel ignorância encerrando a palavra’). Ignorance, in this instance, has the pejorative connotation that resonates in the ironies of my epigraph taken from Boaventura de Sousa Santos, whose ‘incapable writing’ actually parallels the sublime ignorance of poetry I here write about (114).6 In a very recent poem, Ramos Rosa retrieves that earlier, ambiguous tone once again: ‘o poema atravessa a noite da ignorância . . .’ (‘the poem traverses the night of ignorance’ [‘Treze poemas inéditos’ 120]). Almost a decade after O incêndio dos aspectos, however, ignorance had stopped being cruel and dark and negative. In O livro da ignorância, ignorance becomes, rather, the poet’s purified desire and way of being: ‘Quanto eu escrever que seja o cimo ignorante / do bem-estar’ (‘Whatever I write, let it be the ignorant tip / of well-being’ [7]). The whole sequence of O livro da ignorância plays

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skilfully with the dialectics of knowledge and ignorance throughout, and it does not take long for the reader to come to the conclusion that ignorance is the supreme kind of knowledge: ‘Ignoro mas conheço / a fluidez essencial’ (‘I do not know yet do know / the essential fluidity’ [9]). Ignorance is a deeper knowledge, the kind of knowledge that accounts for contradictions and paradoxes, and amounts to gathering, ‘at the centre’, the ‘harmonium’ of being, as one of the lyrics in O livro da ignorância puts it (13). Like Stevens, Ramos Rosa charges the word ‘harmónio’ with all the meanings allowed by its etymology, even to the harmony of the stars, or constellations. Ramos Rosa’s ignorance is a sense, it tastes light and darkness, and reaches deep into their very substance fully to see it, from the dark to the light, as if in a purging process: ‘Toda a ignorância saboreia as substâncias escuras / que nascem para a claridade do fundo de si mesmas’ (‘All ignorance savours the dark substances / born into brightness from out of their own depths’ [15]). If, early in the twentieth century, Pessoa/Caeiro established his programme for an unlearning that is a knowing sense without thinking (what Pessoa called ‘uma aprendizagem de desaprender’ (‘a learning of how to unlearn’ [xxiv]), and if Stevens, by mid-century, announced in his own programmatic poem, ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, that the poet ‘must become an ignorant man again’ (CPP 329), at the end of the century, Ramos Rosa brings another bright star to this constellation by writing his own metapoetic book of ignorance. The constellation I here speak of is the constellation of all poets (Pessoa, Stevens, Ramos Rosa are only three of the most distinguished ones in modernity) who, in the Western tradition, explicitly rebel against Plato’s sentence in The Republic concerning the ‘rational’ and the ‘irrational’. Severing thought from sense, or reason from unreason, and giving reason priority, Plato (or perhaps Plato’s followers) inaugurated the fragmented experience of being that has dominated the lot of Western humans ever since.7 Judging from the wealth of creativity to which it has given rise, this Platonic interruption is comparable to the felix culpa of Christianity. Some of the most luminous poetry in the Western tradition potently speaks the return to the before-thought, as Heidegger would say, the going back to the primordial harmony of being-one – as being (Sein) and as being-there (Dasein). Ramos Rosa’s formulation is ‘estar a ser’ (being-there being). Pessoa/Campos had already called attention to the existential difference between the Portuguese verbs ‘ser’ (to be) and ‘estar’ (to be-there), ‘A difference of verb / Corresponding to reality’ (‘Uma diferença de verbo / Que corresponde à realidade’ [Obra poética 329]). In O livro da ignorância, Ramos Rosa bridges this most productive verbal gap by invoking the ‘crystalline science’ of the wind, the water and the foliage: E estar a ser é como ciência cristalina que é o saber só da brisa entre a folhagem


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e o tremor da água e o ócio fresco que em círculos crescentes se propaga e renova . . . (16) (And being-there being is like crystalline science merely the knowledge of the wind in the foliage and the quivering of the water and cool idleness that in circles spreads and renews itself ) This feeling, I suggest, is what Stevens calls being a ‘native in the world’ (CPP 148). I have just quoted from ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ (XXVIII), but it is in ‘Chocorua to Its Neighbor’ (CPP 263–8) that poetic nativeness is best understood as the ‘acutest speech’ (of both language and tongue), the instant and perfect coincidence of ‘being’ and ‘being-there’ – as the impossible coincidence of night, light and being. Two stanzas in the mountain’s attempt to understand the poet’s proper speech, stanzas III and XXV, put side by side, show that it (proper speech) depends on the poet’s nativeness, or pure and elemental congeniality with the all: At the end of night last night a crystal star, The crystal-pointed star of morning, rose And lit the snow to a light congenial To this prodigious shadow, who then came In an elemental freedom, sharp and cold. (CPP 263–4) Last night at the end of night and in the sky, The lesser night, the less than morning light, Fell on him, high and cold, searching for what Was native to him in that height, searching The pleasure of his spirit in the cold. (CPP 268) Poets can still be natives in the world by going back to the ‘ignorant intelligence’ of air and total sense. The Ramos Rosa poem in O livro da ignorância to which I have just alluded closes like this: Estendemos as linhas brancas que pensamos tão rápidas e minuciosas como o vento e é já real o canto e o grande ritmo da ignorante inteligência aérea e animal (16)

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(We stretch out the white lines that we think as swift and meticulous as the wind and already the song is real and the vast rhythm of the ignorant intelligence, aerial and animal) Stevens was as obsessed as Ramos Rosa with dis-covering ur-knowledge as fullness of being. No fewer than 207 lines match a search for derivatives of know∗ in John Serio’s indispensable on-line concordance. Let me stop briefly at ‘Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas’, where the poet delivers a half-comic erudite talk on the nature of poetry (CPP 227–34). Early on in the poem, the poet asks: Where is that summer warm enough to walk Among the lascivious poisons, clean of them, And in what covert may we, naked, be Beyond the knowledge of nakedness, as part Of reality, beyond the knowledge of what Is real, part of a land beyond the mind? (CPP 228) Perhaps Stevens’ poem does not offer up adequate answers to these questions. But, curiously enough, Ramos Rosa’s O livro da ignorância does. In Ramos Rosa, the song of poetry erupts from ‘burning ignorance’ and from the first beginning, when love happens once again: E um canto nascerá da ignorância acesa em que o silêncio é núbil ou gravidade branca e um movimento de areia une os braços amantes (22) (And a song will erupt from the burning ignorance where silence is nubile or white gravity and a movement of sand unites the loving arms) There is a moment in Ramos Rosa’s O livro da ignorância in which the poet claims arrogantly to know the essential knowledge of being human – ‘Sei de beijos’ (‘I know kisses’), he insists – a moment in which he claims to know the primordial knowing of the senses: ‘Conheço o sabor aceso e espesso do intacto’ (‘I know the burning, thick taste of the intact’ [25]). Knowing the luminous thick flavour (‘sabor’) of the intact is absolutely to know (‘saber’), or, as Stevens would also have it, ‘[t]o live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it’ (CPP 904). The intact is not a favourite word with Stevens (the concordance yields only three lines), but in ‘The Bouquet’ (CPP 385) the


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use of the term carries the Mallarméan sense of the never before touched that resonates in Ramos Rosa’s poetry throughout (not to mention Stevens’ awareness in ‘The Bouquet’ of Mallarmé’s absent, bouquet-less flower in ‘Igitur’). The return to the purity of the never-before (touched) is, in Ramos Rosa, like ‘opening a space of live ignorance’ (‘abrir um espaço de ignorância viva . . .’) where the song begins, there/here, in ‘absolute absence’ (‘É aqui / que começa o canto aqui na ausência absoluta’ [‘This is / where the song begins here in absolute absence’ (78)]). Absence, the intact, the desert, ignorance – along with silence, whiteness, innocence, purity, the absolute, fire – are not concepts but images of poetry as being ever a first, amazed and amazing beginning. In his more recent O aprendiz secreto (The Secret Apprentice), a sequence of prose poems in which the poet is both the ‘builder’ and ‘the supreme ignorant man’ (18), Ramos Rosa speaks of ‘construction’ as the ‘fruit’ of the ‘first ignorance’ (44). (Stevens’ ‘first idea’ and ‘supreme fiction’ cannot but come to mind.) As you go on reading the series of sketches in O aprendiz secreto, you can clearly hear Ramos Rosa reading himself and many other poets, including Wallace Stevens. Where Ramos Rosa wishes that the ‘construction’ should not swerve from the ‘purity of its essential lines’ (56), you may well recall the ‘pure principle’ that in ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ is the ‘time of innocence’ (CPP 360). Or the transcendence of contraries in ‘No Possum, No Sop, No Taters’ (CPP 261–2), where the poet acknowledges that it is ‘in this bad, that we reach / The last purity of the knowledge of good’. One more interesting juxtaposition is an early Stevens poem, entitled ‘Architecture’ (CPP 66–7) and constructed mainly as questions are asked, whose first line reads: ‘What manner of building shall we build?’ In the fourth stanza, the first one with no question marks, a decision is made: ‘Let us build the building of light’. Such construction reverberates uncannily in a surreal section of O aprendiz secreto (47), in which powerful images of barren land and the desert, a ‘green vagina’ as origin, and ‘unputrefiable purity’ (pureza imputrescível) are brought together luminously to open the ‘first space’ of ‘originary freedom’ once known as ‘originary unity’. Poetic ignorance, one must conclude, the not knowing that is actually a finer kind of knowledge, would thus seem to be a kind of purification as well, but a purification subversive of the Platonic katharsis, a process not of separation and exclusion, but of inclusion and unification, for the plenitude of experience.8 As I started out by saying, I am more interested in understanding constellations of poets than in tracing influences or pinpointing exact intertextualities. Poets are readers, and they read mainly each other, even if they prefer not to acknowledge explicitly what they most read. But rather than one more theory of influence or intertextuality, I think we need a theory of poetic ignorance, or a theory of the construction of poetic ignorance, to account for the particular constellations of poets I have begun to sketch here. Such a theory of poetry-as-ignorance would have to include as well the Brazilian Manoel de Barros, whose O livro das ignorãças (1993) could not but have ‘read’

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Ramos Rosa, Stevens and, of course, Fernando Pessoa. Manoel de Barros is the poet of the ‘despalavra’ (unword), who gleefully, and irrelevantly, boasts he understands bees better than German, and celebrates his ‘un-knowledge’ as the perfect contentment of being-there being. How not to think of Stevens’ knowledgeable squirrels or Ramos Rosa’s animal intelligence? As Manoel de Barros says in the poem that lends me my second epigraph, poets need no concepts to understand the world. I believe that both Stevens and Ramos Rosa (not to mention Pessoa) would subscribe to Manoel de Barros’s arrogant and joyous, ungrammatical and anti-Platonic confession: ‘noventa por cento do que / escrevo é invenção; só dez por cento que é mentira’ (‘ninety percent of what / I write is invention; only ten percent that’s lies’ [‘Auto-retrato’, Ensaios fotográficos 45]).9

Notes I wish to thank Bart Eeckhout and Edward Ragg for having inspired this chapter with their conference ‘Fifty Years On: Wallace Stevens in Europe’ (Oxford, 2005). My thanks as well to Monica Andrade for her comments and suggestions. 1. Ramos Rosa tells me he first encountered Stevens in a bilingual selection published either in a Spanish or French magazine. I am still trying to identify the publication in question. 2. María Zambrano deals very cogently with this question in Filosofía y poesía (esp. 13–25). But the names of Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy or Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, among others, come to mind as well. By rereading Plato’s dialogues to question the radical opposition between philosophy and literature in Western thought and discussing anew the old distinction between art and truth, Max Statkiewicz’s forthcoming Rhapsody of Philosophy: Dialogues with Plato in Contemporary Thought (Pennsylvania State University Press) is a major contribution to solving this problem. 3. Listen to these lines from O incêndio dos aspectos (no. 20): ‘Qualidade do instante na boca, / língua de palpitante sede que resurge o corpo / para além da memória, na pedra do incesto’ (‘Quality of the instant in the mouth, / tongue of palpitating thirst resurging the body / beyond memory, on the rock of incest’). 4. I am grateful to Richard Zenith for letting me see his unpublished translation of this book, even if I do not always follow his formulations. 5. My paper, entitled ‘Verde coincidência: A poesia feliz de António Ramos Rosa’ (‘Green Coincidence: António Ramos Rosa’s Happy Poetry’), was not immediately published and was forgotten for a while; but it is now forthcoming in a collection of essays on Ramos Rosa, edited by Rosa Alice Branco. 6. Escrita INKZ has recently been published in Portugal by Afrontamento (Porto, 2007). 7. A different strand of the tradition comes down to us from Sappho (see duBois). 8. I am indebted here to a fine essay on Artaud by Max Statkiewicz (see Works Cited). 9. See also his Ensaios fotográficos 17 (‘Sou capaz de entender as abelhas do que alemão’). Cf. ‘Despalavra’ (23), which lends me my other epigraph (‘. . . that poets can understand / the world without concepts’).


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Works cited Barros, Manuel de. O livro das ignorãças. 1993. Rpt Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1994. Barros, Manuel de. Ensaios fotográficos. 2000. Rpt Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2003. duBois, Page. Sappho Is Burning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Hegel, G. F. W. Einleitung in die Ästhetik. München: Wilhelm Fink, 1967. Hegel, G. F. W. Introduction to Aesthetics. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Heidegger, Martin. Was heisst Denken? Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1954. Heidegger, Martin. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1960. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Second rev. edn. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Pessoa, Fernando. Obra poética. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1981. Ramos Rosa, António. Poesia, liberdade livre. Lisboa: Moraes, 1962. Ramos Rosa, António. A construção do corpo. Lisboa: Portugália, 1969. Ramos Rosa, António. Boca incompleta. Lisboa: Arcádia, 1977. Ramos Rosa, António. A palavra e o lugar. Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 1977. Ramos Rosa, António. As marcas no deserto. Lisboa: & Etc., 1978. Ramos Rosa, António. A poesia moderna e a interrogação do real. 2 vols. Lisboa: Arcádia, 1979. Ramos Rosa, António. O incêndio dos aspectos. Lisboa: Regra do Jogo, 1980. Ramos Rosa, António. Volante verde. Lisboa: Moraes, 1986. Ramos Rosa, António. O livro da ignorância. Ponta Delgada: Signo, 1988. Ramos Rosa, António. ‘A leitura de um livro por outro livro e a sua correspondência intertextual’. Soletrar o dia: obra poética. Ed. Rosa Alice Branco. N.p.: Edições Quasi, 2002. 233–4. Ramos Rosa, António. ‘Treze poemas inéditos’. Espacio / Espaço Escrito: Revista de literature en dos lenguas números 23 y 24 (Badajoz, 2004): 119–35. Ramos Rosa, António. Génese. Lisboa: Roma Editora, 2005. Ramos Rosa, António. O aprendiz secreto. 2001. Second edn. Famalicão: Edições Quasi, 2005. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. Escrita INKZ. Anti-manifesto para uma arte incapaz. Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano Editora, 2004. Statkiewicz, Max. ‘Fiery Purification: Artaud’s Theater of Metamorphoses’. Analecta Husserliana LXXXI. Ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004. 83–100. Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous. Ed. Milton J. Bates. New York: Knopf, 1989. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. Zambrano, María. Filosofía y poesía. 1939. Rpt México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996.

14 Reading Stevens in Italian Massimo Bacigalupo

While Wallace Stevens never set foot in Italy, his poetry arrived there earlier than in any country except the United States and Britain. In January 1954 the first book of Stevens in another language, Mattino domenicale ed altre poesie, was published in Turin by Einaudi, a major publisher of left-wing leanings. This remains a milestone in the reception of Stevens because the editor and translator, Renato Poggioli of Harvard University, corresponded extensively with the poet, eliciting comments (especially on ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’) that scholars have treasured ever since. Since Stevens’ comments were printed in English by Poggioli in the endnotes, Mattino domenicale can be described to some extent as a book co-authored by Stevens and published in Italy (see my ‘Stevens, Poggioli’). France, which occupied so large a place in Stevens’ thoughts, was slower in developing an interest in the great American Francophile: the first French translation in book form appeared only in 1963, and Stevens is still ignored by major publishers. This lucky Italian record was largely due to the foresight of Poggioli, who at Harvard had an inside view of what was what in American poetry, and whose aesthetic sensibility (he was a comparatist and Slavist by profession, educated in Florence before the war) responded to Stevens’ solemn aestheticism. Thirty-two years were to pass before another Italian book of Stevens poems would appear in 1986 with a small publisher in Palermo: Il mondo come meditazione, which I edited and translated. (A revised edition was brought out in 1998 under a major Milan imprint, Guanda.) As I write, at least six books by Stevens can be purchased in Italy:

Mattino domenicale e altre poesie (1954, rev. edn. Turin: Einaudi, 1988) Il mondo come meditazione (1986, rev. edn. Milan: Guanda, 1998) Note verso una suprema finzione (1987, o.p.) L’angelo necessario. Saggi sulla realtà e l’immaginazione (1988, rev. edn. Milan: SE, 2000) 216

Reading Stevens in Italian

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Aurore d’autunno (Milan: Garzanti, 1992) Harmonium. Poesie 1915–1955 (Turin: Einaudi, 1994) The latter is a massive volume of selected poems which I edited 40 years after Mattino domenicale, and for the same publisher, slipcased and illustrated with Pennsylvania Dutch art. (It was reviewed in the spring 1996 issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal.) I believe this record of publication is unique in non-English speaking countries, and this is to the credit of Italian publishing and scholarship. Though one book, L’angelo necessario, has been remaindered to the chagrin of its small publisher, I have noticed with pleasure that many of these books are sold in the United States by specialized booksellers at a considerably higher price than the current Italian ones. Stevens’ shares are doing well in the small world of book collecting, and his Italian reputation would appear to be considerable. Could these books be useful to non-Italian Stevens scholars? They all contain introductions and extensive notes that could contribute to the ‘endlessly elaborating’ work of annotation. Translation itself is a valuable means of understanding a text, an implicit commentary. Sometimes it can tell us what the translator would like the text to mean, presenting a kind of conflict or agon (or oversight, which however is also indicative). For example, in 1986 I rendered as follows the lines from ‘The Rock’: Stevens 1954

Bacigalupo 1986

The sounds of the guitar //

I suoni della chitarra //

Were not and are not. Absurd. The words spoken / Were not and are not. It is not to be believed. (CP 525)

Erano e non erano. Assurdo. Le parole pronunciate / Erano e non erano. Non è da credersi. (93)

When I sent Il mondo come meditazione to Holly Stevens, she pointed out that her father had not written that ‘The sounds of the guitar / Were and were not’, which is what the Italian conveys, but had bleakly asserted that they ‘Were not and are not’. So when I revised the translation in 1998 I changed the lines to: The sounds of the guitar // Were not and are not. Absurd. The words spoken / Were not and are not. It is not to be believed.

I suoni della chitarra // Non erano e non sono. Assurdo. Le parole pronunciate / Non erano e non sono. Non è da credersi.

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In this case I had inadvertently smoothed over Stevens’ pronouncement. Not total annihilation but possibility: perhaps the sounds ‘were’, perhaps they ‘were not’. He was truly Italianized! Such things, however, keep cropping up. Another slip was pointed out to me just recently. Both in the 1986 and 1998 editions of Il mondo come meditazione the last lines of ‘On the Way to the Bus’ read as follows: Stevens 1957

Bacigalupo 1998

A way of pronouncing the word inside of one’s tongue / Under the wintry trees of the terrace. (OP 1957 116)

Un modo di pronunciare il mondo entro la propria lingua / Sotto gli alberi invernali della terrazza. (187)

Here I read ‘world’ for ‘word’, and clearly preferred the more grandiose phrase to Stevens’ commonplace statement. But is it commonplace? One reason I mistook ‘word’ for ‘world’ was that with the definite article before it ‘the world’ is more predictable in the context than ‘the word’. There is only one world most of the time, but there are many words. So we would expect in the original ‘a word’. By writing ‘the word’ Stevens is making the statement unusual, asking us to stop and consider ‘the word’. Had he written ‘the world’ the line would have been less arresting. So I was actually making Stevens more banal. That I should have mistaken world for word served me right, since I once took to task in print Herman Melville’s most notable Italian translator, the novelist Cesare Pavese, for translating ‘This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet’ (Moby-Dick, ‘The TryWorks’) as if Melville had written ‘This wilful word hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet’, which in any case would make little sense. By then I had already made the same mistake in the opposite direction! Of course writers are the first to tinker with words and ambiguities. We are used to reading the moving ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’ as if it were carved in marble. But I was interested to discover that in a recording that Stevens made of it, possibly before publication, some lines in the early part differ from the published version. When and if Il mondo come meditazione is reprinted, the offending line shall become: ‘Un modo di pronunciare la parola entro la propria lingua’. ‘Tongue’ can be both a language and the part of our body with which we speak. Fortunately, in Italian the word ‘lingua’ has the same double meaning. But now that I’m aware that Stevens wrote ‘the word’, the primary meaning is the body organ, whereas had it been ‘the world’ I would have opted (as in fact I did implicitly) for the language meaning.


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What could the phrase ‘to pronounce inside of one’s tongue’ mean if we think of the body part? It seems to be a variant of ‘tongue-in-cheek’: instead of moving the tongue, the sounds remain ‘inside it’. This may sound ludicrous and persuade readers that ‘language’ is the intended meaning, but this is hardly the case. ‘To speak without speech’ is one of the many paradoxes in ‘To an Old Philosopher’, and I suggest that this is what Stevens intended in this much more matter-of-fact poem. The next and final line, ‘Under the wintry trees of the terrace’, would seem to underline that the entire action is essentially physical. We could dwell on the simple alliterations and consonances in these seven words: under . . . wintry trees . . . terrace. I suppose that if we think a phrase without speaking it we are somehow pronouncing it ‘inside of [our] tongue’. Linguists tell us that whenever we read a phrase we ‘speak’ it in our minds, otherwise we would not know it or understand it. One of the interesting things about this straightforward poem is that the act of pronouncing should be the climax of a set of minimal revelations brought on by the ‘light snow’ that the ‘journalist’ finds ‘On the Way to the Bus’:

Stevens

Bacigalupo 1998 (with correction)

. . . a perfection emerging from a new known, / An understanding beyond journalism, //

. . . una perfezione che emerge da un nuovo sapere, / Una conoscenza al di là del giornalismo, //

A way of pronouncing the word inside of one’s tongue / Under the wintry trees of the terrace.

Un modo di pronunciare la parola entro la propria lingua / Sotto gli alberi invernali della terrazza.

As in many Stevens poems, the subject is epiphany, the revelations available to humans in their daily lives. The poem itself by pretending to describe the new knowledge creates it. We can feel this by way of the rhetorical insistence in the search for expressing the nature of the new understanding – ‘beyond journalism’, that is beyond the character’s ephemeral occupation. But in a sense all of us are ‘journalists’ insofar as we live day by day. Stevens’ suggestion is that through poetry we can lift ourselves as by our own bootstraps beyond the ephemeral and know revelation and ‘reality’, whatever that may be. Through its change and cold nature it gives us a thrill and suddenly we are speeding towards a vision, perhaps even a personal religion. The continuing reputation of Wallace Stevens, whose language is about the search for meaning and transcendence, proves the importance of religion and its cadences to contemporary men and women. For there is no doubt that Stevens’ sonorous yet unsentimental meditations would not be

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out of place from a High Church pulpit. He is always beckoning his reader towards revelation, sometimes with ponderous, perhaps parsonic, humour – the humour of the Old Manse. Nothing below the essential matters of life and death (and love and play) ever really distracts him from his grandiose pursuits. On Sunday we do not concern ourselves with what we do the rest of the week. Stevens is a Sunday poet. This has taken us far from the joys and pains of translation. Yet translation is one of the main instruments available for delving into a text. According to an interesting study by Tim Parks, Translating Style: A Literary Approach to Translation – A Translation Approach to Literature, a translation is an excellent signpost towards whatever in a text deviates from standard language, because the translator will probably be forced to normalize the original so as not to be accused of falling into ‘translatorese’. And it is precisely the points within a text that deviate from linguistic standards and norms that reveal a writer’s peculiarity. Thus also translation ‘errors’ can be the portals of discovery, and a bilingual reader is in a better position to appreciate what is unique about Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway or Wallace Stevens. This contention is also proved by inadvertent slips like the ones discussed above. In both instances my translation normalized or made more palatable Stevens’ unexpected statement. Let’s look, for another example, at the opening lines of ‘The World as Meditation’ with my Italian translation and Claire Malroux’s recent French translation (2006): Stevens 1954

Bacigalupo 1998

Malroux 2006

Is it Ulysses that approaches È forse Ulisse che Venant de l’est, est-ce from the east, / sopraggiunge dall’oriente, / Ulysse qui approche, / The interminable adventurer? Interminabile avventuriero? L’interminable aventurier ? The trees are mended. / Gli alberi sono mondi. / Les arbres sont réparés, / That winter is washed away. Quell’inverno è lavato via. Cet hiver est balayé. (CP 520) (83) (55)

Stevens’ text is not far from standard English, though ‘interminable’ is an unusual qualifier for ‘adventurer’, and ‘mended’ is rather strange in connection with trees. And why is it ‘That winter’? Perhaps because we are inadvertently made to share Penelope’s (or Stevens’) point of view: ‘That winter is finally over’. And ‘washed away’ is again a curious collocation. Like ‘mended’ it may suggest that nature is looked upon like a house that has been ‘spring-cleaned’. Penelope, who is well-known for her ‘interminable’ weaving, uses words related to domestic activities. How have the translators reproduced the original’s departure from expected diction? The Latinate ‘interminable’ was easy to carry over, as well as the deictic ‘That’ – though Malroux has rendered it as if Stevens had written ‘this’, because had she wanted ‘that’ she would have had to write ‘cet hiver là’,


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which is cumbersome. (In any case, even in Italian ‘Questo inverno’ may have been a good solution.) With ‘mended’ however the two translations part ways. Malroux translated simply with ‘réparés’: ‘the trees have been repaired’. I have used an unusual Italian word, ‘mondi’, which means ‘cleaned’, ‘shucked’, ‘husked’. I probably was attracted by this unusual word because it is similar in sound to ‘mended’, a word with which Stevens played around in an earlier poem (‘Idiom of the Hero’), clearly liking the finality of its sound. However, as a critic of my translation pointed out on his website, ‘mondi’ could also be the noun meaning ‘worlds’ (here we go again). In a poem called ‘The World as Meditation’ the reader is likely to read the sentence to mean ‘The trees are worlds’, which is far from Stevens’ intention. On the other hand, ‘riparati’ or ‘aggiustati’ doesn’t persuade me, though I may use the second when and if I get a chance to correct my translation. (I have often discovered that correcting a translation is a risky business, because what looks like an error or a slip may be a deliberate choice due to considerations that one has forgotten, if the translation is by oneself, or not understood, if by another hand.) Also, ‘lavato via’ is more literal than ‘balayé’ (‘swept away’), which seems to standardize Stevens’ statement. Parks’s contention that deviations from usage indicate an author’s central concerns is I think supported even by these few words. ‘Interminable’ points to Stevens’ idea of ‘endlessly elaborating’ and anticipates the moving image of Penelope forever repeating Ulysses’ ‘name with its patient syllables’. (Stevens may have known the famous anonymous Russian text, A Pilgrim’s Journey, in which the Pilgrim taught himself to repeat the words ‘God have mercy’ with every breath and heartbeat, even in sleep.) ‘Mended’ and ‘washed away’ suggest an image of the universal mind/energy going about its business like a gardener or a housewife. Let’s look at another passage of ‘The World as Meditation’, the fifth tercet: Stevens 1954

Bacigalupo 1998

She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone. /

Non voleva nulla ch’egli non potesse portarle venendo solo. /

Malroux 2006

Elle ne désirait rien qu’il ne pût lui apporter par sa seule venue. / She wanted no Non voleva cose. Ne désirait aucun fetchings. His arms Le braccia di lui le présent. Ses bras à lui would be her necklace / sarebbero state collana / seraient son collier / And her belt, the final E cintura, fortuna Et sa ceinture à elle, fortune of their desire. ultima del loro desiderio. l’heureuse issue de leur désir.

The two unusual collocations, ‘fetchings’ and ‘fortune’, have been standardized by Malroux, who replaces them with common words for ‘presents’ and ‘issue’. One of Tim Parks’s more striking observations is that students, when

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shown parallel texts in two languages and asked to identify the original and the translation, almost invariably decide that the translation is the original, of which the original (they conclude) is a poor translation. In this case a French student of English may well find the French much more agile than the English, with its heavy-handed words like ‘fetchings’, which only a non-English speaker would ever use for ‘gifts’! Another interesting phrase is ‘bring by coming alone’. Malroux translates as if it meant ‘by merely coming’. I render it as if it meant ‘by coming without any companion (or thing)’. Here Malroux is probably in the right; she has caught the strangeness of the notion and of the syntax and lexicon (‘coming’ as a gerund, ‘alone’ as its qualifier). I have taken the easier path, though true to say Stevens may have wanted us to entertain both readings. Penelope wants ‘him’ to come alone. Then the next line (‘She wanted no fetchings’) throws another light on the previous sentence: she only wants his ‘coming’. And that may be why also the gifts are suggested by a verb used as a noun: ‘She wanted no fetchings’ – she only wants coming! But ‘fortune’ is a thematic word in Stevens, as a look at the online concordance to his poems will confirm. To the English reader’s mind it suggests various possibilities (‘luck’, ‘wealth’, ‘fate’), none excluding the other. And ‘final fortune’ with its strong alliteration conveys the richness and grandeur of the notion, again as in a religious incantation from the Authorized Version. Malroux has rejected the easily available French ‘fortune’, thus impoverishing Stevens. In this case the French or Italian word is very similar in connotations and strangeness (in context). And of course thematic words are enhanced by strangeness. In Italian I have preserved ‘fortune’. I also could have reproduced the alliteration by writing ‘fortuna finale’ (in Italian the adjective is usually postponed). But English ‘final’ and Italian ‘finale’ do not have the same connotations, thus ‘fortuna ultima’ (‘last, extremest fortune’). The blind goddess makes another appearance in ‘To an Old Philosopher’:

Stevens 1954

Bacigalupo 1998

Carrera 2006

Malroux 2006

Things dark on the Cose oscure Le cose oscure sugli Des choses obscures horizons of all’orizzonte della orizzonti della aux horizons de la perception, / percezione / percezione / perception / Become Divengono diventano Deviennent accompaniments compagne accompagnamenti accompagnements of fortune, but / fortunate, ma / della fortuna, ma / du destin, mais / Of the fortune of the Della fortuna dello della fortuna dello Du destin spirituel, spirit, beyond the spirito, oltre spirito, oltre lo au-delà de eye, . . . (CP 508) l’occhio . . . (51) sguardo, . . . (39) l’œil, . . . (31)

In this case we have a second Italian translation (2006) to compare. Malroux now chooses to translate ‘fortune’ as ‘destin’, thus missing again the idea of


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wealth and luck implicit in the term, which here is important because of the contrast with the previous line: ‘dark things’ become – fortunate. This must have been the reasoning behind my choice of rendering ‘accompaniments of fortune’ as ‘compagne fortunate’, fortunate companions. There is more than an element of the arbitrary in doing this, since ‘accompaniments’ is not only or mainly ‘companions’. I suppose I decided to have my way to please the ear: ‘accompagnamenti della fortuna’ just did not sound right. Let’s also consider line 1: Malroux and Carrera make ‘Things dark’ more common by adding an article: ‘Le cose oscure’, ‘Des choses obscures’. I think that leaving the matter indefinite as in my translation (‘Cose oscure’) better suggests the solemn tone of this testamentary elegy. And why did I translate ‘horizons’ as singular? Both Carrera and Malroux have followed Stevens here. My choice clearly aimed at a clearer sound in the line, on the assumption that ‘horizon’ or ‘horizons’ makes little difference to the meaning. But the question remains open. On the other hand, my translation is the only one that has preserved the plural ‘newsboys’ in the next stanza’s ‘newsboys’ muttering’:

Stevens 1954

Bacigalupo 1998

Carrera 2006

Malroux 2006

. . . The newsboys’ . . . Il vocio dei muttering / giornalai /

. . . Il brontolio dello strillone /

Becomes another murmuring . . .

diventa un altro mormorare sommesso . . .

. . . La mélopée du vendeur de journaux / Devient un autre murmure . . .

Diviene un diverso mormorio . . .

The substitution of the singular for the plural is probably due to unfamiliarity with the mysteries of the apostrophe after the plural genitive. In fact Malroux revises her original text to read ‘the newsboy’s muttering’. My translation is the only one to preserve the inner rhyme muttering/murmuring with vocìo/mormorìo. Carrera expands the latter into ‘mormorare sommesso’ with no real gain. But he does have a point in rendering ‘newsboy’ as ‘strillone’ (hawker of newspapers) rather than my ‘giornalai’, newsagents. These don’t usually mutter or yell, but stand behind their wares and dole them out. Malroux’s ‘mélopée’ is also clearly wrong for ‘muttering’, since it’s a technical term from poetics and if anything suggests melody rather than the newsboys’ everyday noises. It remains that a lot is lost when we take the plural ‘newsboys’ for a singular. The newsboys are representatives of the world outside, with its ephemeral news, with its cacophony of voices. Yet, and this is the strangeness of the annotation, the cacophony becomes the voice of consciousness, of prayer: the outer becomes the inner. Just as ‘the smell / Of medicine’ becomes ‘a fragrantness not to be spoiled’.

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This is the point that Stevens repeats marvellously later in the poem: The life of the city never lets go, nor do you Ever want it to. It is part of the life in your room. (CP 510) And he goes on to speak of the bells as an example of expression versus silence, of the desire to fill the world with forms and symbols of the invisible. I detect here a defence of images and saints that takes sides in the conflict between High Church (or Roman Catholic) Christianity versus Puritan rigour: Stevens 1954

Bacigalupo 1998

Malroux 2006

The bells keep on repeating solemn names //

Le campane vanno ripetendo nomi solenni //

Les cloches répètent sans cesse les noms solennels //

In choruses and choirs In cori, e in corali of choruses, / di cori, / Unwilling that mercy Perché il perdono should be a mystery / non sia mistero / Of silence, that any solitude of sense / Should give you more than their peculiar chords / And reverberations clinging to whisper still.

En chœurs et chorales de chœurs, / Refusant que la miséricorde soit un mystère / Del silenzio, né De silence, qu’aucune alcuna solitudine dei solitude des sens / sensi / Possa darti più dei Te livre davantage loro particolari que leurs accords accordi / singuliers / E riverberi che si Et les échos qui afferrano al sussurro. s’accrochent encore au murmure.

The last line gives pause. Do the reverberations ‘cling to whispers’, or are they ‘clinging’ in order to ‘whisper’? Both translations choose the first alternative, which seems highly unlikely. You can’t ‘cling to a whisper’ – not even in Wallace Stevens. Perhaps the translators were aware of the text’s true meaning but chose to literalize the metaphor in order to get something across. In any case, this little difficulty points again the way to an unusual segment of the text, where Stevens is evoking the whispering and suggesting that the bells’ tolling seems to adhere (to cling) to the city’s architecture in order to keep reverberating. It is an image of Stevens’ own late music, ‘clinging to whisper still’. And, as mentioned above, he is defending expression, poetry, versus ‘any solitude of sense’, an alliterating phrase and metaphor by


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which he means absence of sensation. A solitary sense is a sense that senses nothing. The whole point of life is sensation, and through it perception and vision. The bells are said to be ‘Unwilling that mercy should be a mystery’. This is preserved by Malroux’s ‘Refusant que’, while in my translation I have glossed over the awkwardness of having bells ‘refuse’ something by simply writing ‘So that mercy should not be a mystery’. Something is lost, but something is gained in concision and finality of statement, which are also important considerations. The later Stevens, with his relatively straightforward diction, is peculiarly amenable to translation. Malroux notices aptly in her preface that there is ‘no arrogance in the testament of this scribe inspired by the planet’ (11; my translation). She is thinking of the lines in which ‘Ariel’ assesses his poems and states: 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 532–3) Translation can do the same, and with the austere verses of Stevens one can come rather close to the world of the original. He writes out of a common need for expression and finality that is echoed in many readers in a troubled age. Stevens’ final wish that his poems ‘should bear’ a resemblance to the planet ‘of which they were part’ repeats at a distance of six centuries Dante’s prayer at the threshold of the final vision: O somma luce che tanto ti levi da’ concetti mortali, a la mia mente ripresta un poco di quel che parevi, e fa la lingua mia tanto possente, ch’una favilla sol de la tua gloria possa lasciare a la futura gente; ché, per tornare alquanto a mia memoria e per sonare un poco in questi versi, più si conceperà di tua vittoria. (Paradiso 33: 67–75) O light supreme who so far dost uplift thee o’er mortal thoughts, re-lend unto my mind a little of what then thou didst seem,

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and give my tongue such power that it may leave only a single sparkle of thy glory unto the folk to come; for by returning to my memory somewhat, and by a little sounding in these verses, more of thy victory will be conceived. (The Paradiso 403, 405)

Unlike Stevens, Dante wants to leave his testimony to future generations, but only to bear witness to the glory of God (Stevens’ ‘planet’). Dante speaks of conveying ‘a sparkle of thy glory’, Stevens of ‘some lineament or character, some affluence’. Both, strikingly, are poets speaking of their lines. Ariel ‘was glad he had written his poems’. Dante wishes that God’s victory, as he saw it during the wonderful vision, should return to his memory and thence ‘sound a little in these verses’. The situation, and the vision, have barely changed over the centuries. Stevens happily concludes that the poems themselves are part of the world they describe. This is their force and consolation. Allowing for some theological differences, his Florentine colleague would not have disagreed. Not for nothing did he believe a poet important enough to be accompanied on a long journey to the very heights of the heavens. And to have the force and gift to speak of such hidden matters. Perhaps he was a little more arrogant than Stevens, who, however, appears to have been very sure of himself as well – and in the late long poem ‘The Owl in the Sarcophagus’ did not hesitate in turn to visit the world of the dead and report on what he saw there. And what is ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ if not a baffling cosmogony? With some of these imaginative productions, the translator, as well as the common reader, may encounter considerable trouble. By coming to Stevens from outside his usual contexts much can be learned about his place in the wider world of poetics and concepts of art and man, as well as about the actual substance of his work. And here translation is an important aid. Monolingual readers tend to take much for granted, also because a poem becomes second nature and we no longer see its strangeness. Reading a poem one knows well in another language is often a revelation – and a pleasure. When I translated many Stevens poems for my selection Harmonium, I came upon the first such hurdle in ‘Earthy Anecdote’: Every time the bucks went clattering Over Oklahoma A firecat bristled in the way. (CP 3) Apparently, no English-speaking reader had pointed out that a ‘firecat’ is not a creature known to naturalists. Readers had just taken the word for granted. Instead it is the first of many Stevensian inventions, and it is a symbol of the


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unique and the personal. It is a nice coincidence that Stevens’ oeuvre should finish with another creature of fire (in ‘Of Mere Being’): The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down. (OP 1957 118) The same poetic energy is at work. The Spirit descends, or ‘bristles’ against the clattering and muttering of the bucks and the newsboys, or incorporates them. To return to the ‘firecat’, I was interested in discovering that Hart Crane borrowed it unashamedly for a passage in The Bridge (‘Indiana’): ‘the firecat slunk away’ (66). I have since been hoping that this creature, well-known to American poetry if not to the real world, should be given its rightful place in the OED. Situating a poet in a different context implies looking at what has been made of him in other cultures. Dante has been appropriated to different purposes by the American ‘Dante Circles’ (Boston Brahmins, Modernists and so on), just as Shakespeare was variously appropriated by the Schlegels and Brecht. Stevens has not become a dominant figure abroad, as he is not a dominant figure except for the happy few at home. He has remained relevant and widely appreciated, perhaps for the reason indicated above: the human desire to find ‘what will suffice’, or to be told that something ‘suffices’. In any case there is nothing else to build upon, so we better accept our destiny. (Our ‘fortune’?) Studies of influence can be tedious, unless they throw some light on the original writer. In the case of Stevens’ Italian reception, his first translator Poggioli saw him rightly as a mature expression of modern aesthetics, of the conflict (as he put it) between ‘Dichtung und Wahrheit’. Another major Italian proponent of American poetry, the scholar Carlo Izzo, in reviewing Mattino domenicale, said that Stevens belonged, with Frost, Sandburg and Williams, to the old guard of contemporary American poetry, and is perhaps its major exponent, with the exception of Ezra Pound, who is a case to himself, and is by no means old guard. The fact that he belongs to another age is also indicated by the reserve which kept him from publishing his first collection, Harmonium, until 1923. (II, 100; my translation) Izzo heard the preciousness of Amy Lowell and H.D. in Stevens, which today seems improbable but is nevertheless a notable indication. Stevens

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does belong in many ways to the world of E. A. Robinson rather than to the world of Robert Lowell, and by relentlessly post-modernizing him we are showing a lack of historical perspective. Izzo even compares Stevens to Gabriele D’Annunzio, a writer and adventurer born in 1863, 16 years before the Hartford poet, and whose verse is little read today because of its bombastic rhetoric (though his novels were widely appreciated by the likes of Henry James and James Joyce). D’Annunzio’s taste, says Izzo, is ‘the taste of a generation that believed it was happy, yet sat on golden eggs that hatched its own death, and the death of its children, and even of its grandchildren’ (II, 103). Izzo is speaking of the perils of aestheticism (and the aestheticization of politics) which were to lead so many young people and artists to support totalitarian regimes and perish in two world wars. Earlier in his thoughtful review, Izzo summarizes Stevens’ attempt to enter into ‘a non-rational world that words can represent only indirectly, shedding their usual meanings and acquiring new values’ (II, 102). ‘Perhaps’, he comments, ‘this poetry of private worlds is no longer timely’. He was writing in 1955. He goes on to quote one of Stevens’ most significant dialogues with Italy, ‘Reply to Papini’, and cites in the original Papini’s quotation used in Stevens’ epigraph (challenging poets to ‘cease . . . from being the astute calligraphers of congealed daydreams’), and the gist of Stevens’ reply: The poet Has only the formulations of midnight. . . . He shares the confusions of intelligence. . . . The world is still profound and in its depths Man sits and studies silence and himself, Abiding the reverberations in the vaults. (CP 446–7) Here we meet a first occurrence of the ‘reverberations’ of ‘To an Old Philosopher’. Izzo comments: ‘Both are right; but Stevens’ rightness is the rightness of yesterday, and Giovanni Papini’s rightness . . . is the rightness of today’ (II, 103). (Papini was actually two years younger than Stevens, and wrote his Letters of Celestin VI partly as a polemic against Pope Pius XII.) Izzo’s objections are reminiscent of American censors of various ilks, from Yvor Winters to Karl Shapiro and even Randall Jarrell who, it will be remembered, found The Auroras of Autumn a waste of his and Stevens’ time. I cite Izzo as a representative voice (of political engagement in the life of the day, and surely 1955 was a time to be watchful!). It is all the more striking therefore that Stevens should have lasted over the decades and should be read in completely different contexts and still seem relevant. His quiet assertion that


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‘the world is still profound’ is as comforting today as it was at the time of its writing.

Works cited Alighieri, Dante. The Paradiso of Dante Alighieri. Ed. Philip H. Wicksteed and H. Oelsner. London: Dent, 1899. Bacigalupo, Massimo. ‘ “A New Girl in a New Season”: Stevens, Poggioli, and the Making of Mattino Domenicale’. The Wallace Stevens Journal 25.2 (2001): 254–70. Carrera, Alessandro and Thomas Simpson. La luce migliore. Poeti americani in Italia. Milan: Medusa, 2006. Crane, Hart. The Poems of Hart Crane. Ed. Marc Simon. New York: Liveright, 1986. Izzo, Carlo. Civiltà americana. 2 vols. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1967. Parks, Tim. Translating Style: A Literary Approach to Translation – A Translation Approach to Literature. London: Cassells, 1997. Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1954. Stevens, Wallace. Mattino domenicale e altre poesie. Ed. Renato Poggioli. Turin: Einaudi, 1954. Rev. edn. 1988. Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous. Ed. Samuel French Morse. New York: Knopf, 1957. Stevens, Wallace. Harmonium. Poesie 1915–1955. Ed. Massimo Bacigalupo. Turin: Einaudi, 1994. Stevens, Wallace. À l’instant de quitter la pièce. Le Rocher et derniers poèmes; Adagia. Ed. Claire Malroux. Paris: Corti, 2006. Stevens, Wallace. Il mondo come meditazione: ultime poesie 1950–1955. Ed. Massimo Bacigalupo. Palermo: Acquario-Guanda, 1986. Rev. edn. Milan: Guanda, 1998.


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Volume 3. ‘Of Mere Being’ (laser prints in combination with screen print)

Coda: Ode to a Colossal Sun Helga Kos

‘Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself’ ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’ ‘A Child Asleep in Its Own Life’ ‘The Planet on the Table’ ‘The Dove in Spring’ ‘Of Mere Being’ ‘A Clear Day and No Memories’ In July 1997 I was asked to use seven of Wallace Stevens’ late poems as a starting point for a series of paintings. The poet was virtually unknown to me. The request was an invitation to participate with my paintings in a musical event organized by the Amsterdam musical ensemble Wendingen. It is common practice for Wendingen to combine their concerts with exhibitions by visual artists. These particular seven poems were set to music in 1972 by the famous American composer Ned Rorem. My paintings were exhibited in November 1997 during Wendingen’s performance of Rorem’s 25-minute song cycle ‘Last Poems of Wallace Stevens’. At the end of the exhibition, the musicians of Wendingen – its founders Marja Bon and Hans Woudenberg, who are also members of the internationally renowned Schönberg Ensemble – decided to produce a CD recording of the ‘Last Poems’. They commissioned me to design the accompanying CD booklet, knowing that I was deeply stirred by the song cycle. I accepted on condition that I would not be held to the traditional size of a CD booklet. Fortunately they agreed, thus paving the road toward a special collaboration. My introduction to ‘Last Poems of Wallace Stevens’ in 1997 led to what turned out to be a fascinating undertaking which would unexpectedly occupy me for a very long time. I was captured by the capacity of Stevens’ poetry to enthrall and at times I felt almost taken hostage by the songs. In 2004 this complex undertaking resulted in the completion of an artist’s book, Ode aan de Kolossale Zon (Ode to the Colossal Sun), in a limited edition, fully handmade. As mentioned, I was asked to design something much 231

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smaller: a CD booklet. But somehow it turned into this extensive piece of art in the form of a three-volume book: 156 pages with handmade prints, all of which I designed and printed myself. It took me more than five years to complete, working full time. Mind you, I am neither a printer, a graphic artist nor a book maker. I am a painter. Looking back at how it all started, it seems quite strange that I, who knew nothing about Stevens’ work or his ideas, nevertheless proved to be so receptive to his complicated, seemingly unfathomable texts. Back in 1997 I had no information on Stevens’ literary and theoretical thinking. I also was not aware of the existence of the vast body of scholarly learning, research and publications on his relatively small body of work. I had nothing but two simple pages containing the name of a poet, seven poems and the dates they were written: between 1954 and 1955, around the time of my birth. Had I known anything about the magnitude of Stevens’ fame within the American literary canon, I probably would have been intimidated or I might have been directed into a merely intellectual approach to the texts. My naïveté was in fact an ideal starting point; almost an advantage. But it is probably significant that I could already obtain a glimpse of understanding even while I was so unfamiliar with Stevens’ complex stock of ideas. My explanation for this is that Wallace Stevens has a special capacity, through his choice of words, to transcend from the linguistic into the visual, so that the poems reveal themselves as word paintings. I intend this as a compliment, not as a reductive truth: I do not mean to deny that Stevens’ poems have many layers of meaning and are richer, more complex and more intellectual than my statement suggests. But while working on the project I felt very strongly that the essence of his poems, especially the late ones, is built up from an intimate personal sense which he directly translates into images. Then, around the skeleton of these images, Stevens intertwines a complex associative network of meanings, thus anchoring them in many different worlds; enriching them, letting them branch off. All the while, however, the images are so strong and accurate that their original connection with the source of the poem remains highly palpable. As a reader, you just need to imagine yourself occupying these images: you need to feel like someone in a blue dress, someone young and walking in the sunshine, a howling dove in the dark, a tree that lacks the intelligence of trees, a river on a sunny day, a palm at the end of the mind, a colossal sun. At least that is, I think, what I unconsciously did. It gave me immediate access to Stevens’ poems. My first encounter with Stevens had generated a series of paintings and gouaches. For the new project I needed the form of a book in order to properly shape my ideas. These ideas were based on the combination of poetry and music. Ned Rorem was inspired by Stevens’ late poems, whilst Stevens himself was inspired by a great many painters, both historic and contemporary. Now,

Coda: Ode to a Colossal Sun

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in turn, Rorem’s composition became the source of inspiration for a work of visual art. I must say that in the beginning, the poems triggered my imagination most. They are so expressive, enigmatic and powerful. Stevens’ work often has as its explicit theme the relationship between reality and the imagination. My own ideas on this subject are, as far as I can see, akin to Stevens’. I remember very well reading the poems for the first time. I received the texts one evening while there was a party going on at my house. So I wasn’t really focused. But even then the poems managed to seduce me. They instantly grabbed me. And although I hardly understood what they were about, they evoked an enormous amount of images in my mind; a stream of raw and undefined ideas; increasingly and incessantly, as I continued reading in the following weeks. It was as if the poems had infected me. My condition worsened when I heard the music that Rorem wrote to these texts. After a while I found myself seriously addicted. I was not surprised to notice, then, that when the concert and the exhibition were finished, the images deriving from Rorem’s songs kept on harassing me, knocking at my skull to get out. There was really nothing I could do but give them a shape. So I started to search for an art form that would truly reflect the characteristics of this music. That is how the idea of a book emerged. There is a great similarity between music and books in the way they both can be experienced only in time. And a book form would offer me all kinds of new possibilities. Pages, for example, have two sides. This may sound obvious, but it provides interesting options. Through transparent and partly cut pages, images could already be announced or suggested, before actually appearing on the scene – much as what happens with tones and themes in musical compositions. In the song cycle the number three plays a significant role. Rorem wrote his music for three instruments: soprano, cello and piano. He used seven poems and added a prelude and an interlude which makes nine sections – nine sections which contrast strongly in timbre, time signature, tempo and rhythm. Soprano, cello and piano appear in many different combinations of importance. Recurring musical themes connect the separate sections. These were elements I could use for my book and which I found challenging. Dividing the book into three volumes would create the possibility to view these volumes side by side. This allows connections to be made between the different image-themes recurring in the three parts. At the same time that I was reflecting on these ideas, the musicians of Wendingen were planning the earlier mentioned CD recording of ‘Last Poems of Wallace Stevens’. Soon after I agreed to design the information booklet for their CD, I realized that it would become very hard to press all my ideas into the small size of a 5-by-5-inch CD box. So instead, we decided to put their CD into my artist’s book.

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The title was easy: Ode to the Colossal Sun. I wanted to work with many different printing techniques and a variety of papers. The CD as well as the texts of the poems were to be incorporated in the imagery. I needed a gifted typographer and asked Josje Pollmann, who skilfully designed the texts of the poems. Josje also turned out to be a marvellous editorial sparring-partner. My intention with this CD-Artist’s Book was that the pages should be interconnected, not be separate graphic sheets. Thus they acquire their meaning in relationship to each other. The images change by turning the pages. After-image and transparency play an important role in this. The poems that Rorem used for his cycle were written by Stevens at the end of his life. And although they are infused with the realization of one’s own mortality, they are not so much about death as about the vitality of life. Only in the poem ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’ does he refer to death implicitly, bringing to our minds the Greek river Styx: ‘There is a great river this side of Stygia’. For me, this poem occupies a key position within the cycle. From here on the project went, so to speak, off the road. From one thing came another and another and another. And I came to understand that making this book would be an enormous amount of work. But also, that there was just no way back. It was going to be one large exploring expedition – especially the printing, for which, being a former student, I was allowed to use the graphic workshop of the Rijksacademy of Visual Arts in Amsterdam. I did a lot of experimenting with various inks on many different papers. It was an advantage not to know much about printing techniques. It allowed me to do weird things, using materials in an a-typical way. But very often the outcome of these tests had great expressive qualities and could be used, like printing on folded sheets or using the ink so greasily that it got pressed through the paper, onto the other side of the page. ‘Smut’ and ‘show-through’, traditionally a printer’s nightmare, were consciously sought-after techniques. In these effects I found links with Stevens’ texts and Rorem’s music. I discovered inks that, when used on certain black paper, changed colour; red became bronze, a bright orange turned into real gold and a specific blue popped up as a sparkling dark pink, days after printing. And one day while I was doing the linoleum prints for the first volume of the book, I noticed that on the protection sheets which I used to keep the press from staining there appeared beautiful rest forms. So I started to save the sheets. The rest forms vaguely referred to the images I was printing. Later I used these sheets in the third volume for a poem in which memory plays a role. Often I was told that this artist’s book, although filled with graphic art, is undeniably the work of a painter. And that is true. The images came into being in a very organic way. They were not pictured but rather emerged while I was printing; in a similar manner as I would create a painting, very directly. This is the reason why I needed to do the printing myself. The book was not designed and then just executed. It manifested itself while working, while mixing the inks, while printing, while making mistakes and doing ‘silly’ tests.

Coda: Ode to a Colossal Sun

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It is not common practice in the printing world to do everything by oneself and my doing so was at times hard to believe for professionals in the field. One day when the book was finished, I showed it to a serious, well-known printer. He examined the box, especially the black wooden pieces that I used for it. ‘Ah, very beautiful,’ he said. ‘Nice job. But how did they blacken the wood? Did they spray these blocks for you?’ ‘Well, not exactly,’ I replied, ‘They didn’t spray them, I just told the fairies at my studio to dip them in a bath filled with black ink.’ He didn’t blink. ‘Really,’ he said. ‘In that case I sure would like to see that studio of yours some day.’ So, some people may have assumed that I kept a squadron of elves or leprechauns under my roof. Others referred to me as ‘the monk’ because I was printing day after day, evening after evening. And from a superficial view people would not see me making any progress. On one occasion at the Rijksacademy in Amsterdam, there was a tour through the graphic workshop for a group of visitors. After the technical advisor had shown them all of the presses, he pointed to me saying, ‘And of course, not to be forgotten, this is our 10-colour printing machine.’ When I say this was an extreme project, most people would agree with me. But it was so satisfying! It was one of the most joyful periods in my life. I loved it. To my regret it had to come to an end. Were it not for my responsibility to the 97 subscribers, some of whom had to wait for four years before they received their book and could benefit from their investment, I don’t know, I might still be printing. For more images of the book and further information: www.arttrack.nl/HelgaKos / [email protected] www.galeriesamuellallouz.com/editions With thanks to Art Support, Daler Rowney, Elise Mathilde Fonds, Fonds BKVB, Kersjes-Van de Groenekan Stichting, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten ThuisKopie Fonds, Anton Meester, Rob Wassenburg, Dortee Farrar and Roger Moss, and the many subscribers to the book. Ode aan de Kolossale Zon is a joint publication by Wendingen, Helga Kos and Galerie Samuel Lallouz, published in 2004. The book consists of 156 pages of handmade prints. It is printed using ten distinct techniques on 12 different types of paper, in a signed and numbered edition of 288. Three volumes in a box, size 34 × 26 × 6 cm. Typography by Josje Pollmann. Includes a special CD performance of the songs by Wendingen. With: Irene Maessen, soprano; Hans Woudenberg, violoncello; Marja Bon, piano. In 2004 the book was awarded Best Dutch Book Design and, in Germany, shortlisted for Best Book Designs from All Over the World. It has been exhibited internationally including displays in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Montreal, Oxford and Paris. The book has been purchased for the

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public collections of, in chronological order: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; LA Louver Gallery, Venice/Los Angeles; Herinneringsfonds Vincent van Gogh, The Hague; Museum Meermanno, The Hague; Royal Library of the Netherlands, The Hague; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; State University of New York at Buffalo; Pierpont Morgan Library & Museum, New York City; Columbia University, New York City; Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

Index Babylon, 122 Balakian, Anna, 151, 162 Barker, George, 175, 183 Barros, Manoel de, 9, 204, 205, 213–14 Ensaios fotográficos, 214 Livro das ignorãças, O, 205, 213–14 Basel, 42, 44 Baudelaire, Charles, 41, 42, 157, 165, 179 ‘Invitation au voyage, L’’, 42 Fleurs du Mal, Les, 42 ‘Paysage’, 42 ‘Vie antérieure, La’, 157 Beckett, Samuel, xvii Bedient, Calvin, 190, 202 Beissel, Conrad, 96 Belgium, 3, 121, 122 belief (see also separate entries for individual religions), 46, 49–50, 99, 201 Bell, Graham, 146 Bellay, Joachim du, 104 Benamou, Michel, 152 Bennett, Joseph, 48 Bergson, Henri, 62 Berlin, 14 Bernard, Émile, 145 Bernstein, Charles, 207 Berry, Chu, 184 Bible, The, 46, 106 Book of Revelation, The, 95 Genesis, 32, 46 Bishop, John Peale, 177 Blanchot, Maurice, xvi, 5, 7, 30, 109, 111–12, 114, 116, 117, 148, 207 Bloom, Harold, 151, 162, 187, 204, 207 Bon, Marja, 231, 235 Bové, Paul, 92 Branco, Rosa Alice, 214 Braque, Georges, 145 Brazeau, Peter, 4, 180 Brazil/Brazilian, 9, 205, 213 Brecht, Bertolt, 227 Britain (see ‘England’, ‘Wales’ etc.)

abstraction, 7–8, 26–7, 43, 44, 46, 51, 52, 53, 66, 67, 69, 73–4, 77, 96, 97, 98, 103, 114, 133–50, 151, 161, 167, 170, 196, 200, 202, 208 Aiken, Conrad, 124, 167 Aix-en-Provence, 18, 195 Altieri, Charles, 103, 150 America/American, xv, 1, 4, 5, 20, 23, 41, 42, 55–6, 62, 64–5, 103–4, 108, 109, 112–13, 121–30, 133–4, 149, 161, 165, 168, 173, 177, 180, 186, 188, 199, 205, 207, 208, 216, 227, 228, 231, 232 architecture, 26 community (idea of), 29–37 Depression, The, 103, 135 national identity, 2–3, 7, 42, 56, 122, 138–9 place-names, 5, 24, 31, 96, 122, 125–7, 199, 201 Transatlantic Americans, 28, 39, 41–2 writing (traits of), 2, 21, 24, 62, 64–5, 126, 133, 138, 186, 193 Amis, Kingsley, 8, 169, 179 Anti-Death League, The, 169 Lucky Jim, 169 Ammons, A. R., 104 Amsterdam, 231–5 Anglican Church (see Church of England) Anjou, 19 Anne, Queen of England, 42, 47 Annunzio, Gabriele D’, 228 Apollo, 208 Apuleius, 168 Arensberg, Walter, 121, 124, 127–9 Ariel, 225 Arnold, Matthew, 37, 195 Artaud, Antonin, 214 Ashton, Dore, 142 Auden, W. H., 166, 172, 173, 177, 180 Azores, The, 209 237

238

Index

Brogan, Jacqueline, 138 Bulgaria, 3 Bush, George W. (Jr.), 29 Buttel, Robert, 131 Bynner, Witter, 124–5 Caeiro, Alberto (see ‘Fernando Pessoa’) Calvin, John, 42 Campbell, Roy, 165 Campos, Álvaro (see ‘Fernando Pessoa’) Camus, Albert, 16 Canada, 2, 122 Canaletto, (Giovanni Antonio Canal), 104 Caribbean, The, 39 Carolina/The Carolinas, 107, 122 Carrera, Alessandro, 222–3 Catholicism (see also ‘belief’ and ‘Christianity’), xvii, 46, 49, 51, 56, 96, 195, 224–6, 228 Caton, R. A., 8, 168–70, 174–6, 179–82 Ceylon, 42, 175 Cézanne, Paul, 7–8, 133, 134, 144–7, 148, 149, 195 China, 42 Christianity (see also ‘belief’ and ‘Catholicism’), 6–7, 43, 95–104, 201, 210, 224–6, 228 post-Christian, 95–100 Church, Barbara, 17, 49, 50 Church, Henry, 17, 20, 44, 56 Church of England, 46 Clarke, Austin, 181 Cleghorn, Angus, 138 Coady, Robert, 127, 129 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 41, 42, 50, 65 Connecticut, 2, 5, 23, 25–8, 31, 122, 133–4, 147, 149 Connolly, Cyril, 166 Constantine, Emperor, 7, 97, 99, 100, 104 Cook, Eleanor, 2, 105, 162 Cooke, Dorian, 168 Crane, Hart, 3, 46, 227 Critchley, Simon, 6, 65, 70–1, 77, 86–8, 92 Crow, Christine, 162 Cuba, 2, 13 Cubism, 121, 127, 145 Curie, Marie, 39

Dalin, Ebba, 17 Dante Alighieri, 225–7 Day-Lewis, Cecil, 169 Democritus, 30 Denmark, 3, 5, 23, 25, 28, 31–4 Depression, The (see ‘America’) Derrida, Jacques, 5, 26, 28, 64, 76, 93, 214 Descartes, René, 62 Dewey, John, 30 Dickens, Charles, 130 Donne, John, 41 Doolittle, Hilda (H. D.), 227 Douglas, (Lord) Alfred, 169 Douglas, Keith, 169 Doyle, Charles, 130 Duchamp, Marcel, xvii, 7, 121–4, 127–30 Duncan, Harry, 170 Duns Scotus, John, 202 Durrell, Lawrence, 168, 169, 175 Dutch (see also ‘Germany’ and ‘Pennsylvania’), 1, 3, 42, 99, 134, 217, 231–6 confusion with ‘Deutsch’, 24 Eberhart, Richard, 183 Edelstein, J. M., 174, 181, 182, 183 Edwards, Michael, 188, 197 Eeckhout, Bart, 76 Eliot, T. S., xvi, 3, 21, 41, 42, 46, 130, 157, 166, 175, 180, 186 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 2, 75, 99, 104, 115, 134 England/English, xv–xvii, 3, 165–85, 186–203, 205, 216, 222 epistemology (see ‘philosophy’) Evans, Donald, 131 Evans, Herschel, 184 Feo, José Rodríguez, 15, 16, 48 Ficke, Arthur Davison, 124 Filreis, Alan, 123, 134, 138–9 First World War (see ‘politics’) Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 3 Florence, 216, 226 Florida, 13, 31, 122 Focillon, Henri, 148

Index France/French, xvii, 2, 3, 15, 20, 108, 112, 117, 121–2, 126, 127, 134, 137, 149, 152, 161, 186, 192–3, 205, 209, 214, 216, 220–5 Francis, St, 99 Fraser, G. S., 175, 183 Freud, Lucian, 170, 175 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 108 Frost, Robert, 227 Fuller, Roy, 169, 183 Fusini, Nadia, xvi Futurism, 124 Gascoyne, David, 175, 183 Gelpi, Albert, 108, 112, 186 genealogy, 1–2, 42, 99, 134 Geneva, 42 Georgia, 122 Germany/German, 1, 3, 214 Pennsylvania Germans (see also ‘Dutch’ and ‘Pennsylvania’), 24, 31, 39, 42, 99, 134, 217 Geyzel, Leonard van, 44, 147, 175 globalization, 6, 28 Goodland, John, 168, 183 Graham, Jorie, 96 Gunn, Thom, 169 Hamburger, Michael, 175 Hamilton, Ian, 188 Hardy, Thomas, 166 Hartford, 1, 2, 6, 17, 18, 21, 25, 26, 28, 31, 55, 95, 123, 147, 175, 228 Havre, Le, 1 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 127 Hegel, G. W. F., 28, 117, 206 Heidegger, Martin, xvi, 6, 28, 32–3, 38, 76, 79–93, 205–6, 210 Basic Concepts, 81–2 Basic Writings, 90, 92, 205–6 Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), 93 Besinnung, 92 ‘Language’, 81 ‘Letter on Humanism’, 80, 91 Was heisst Denken?, 205 Hemingway, Ernest, 3, 220 Henderson, Alice Corbin, 124 Hendry, J. F., 168, 183 Hepworth, Barbara, 175

239

Heraclitus, 25 Heringman, Bernard, 15, 48 Hines, Thomas, 75, 92 historicism, 134, 138 Hoehn, Matthew, 49 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 32, 175, 206 Holland (see also ‘Dutch’), 3 Hollander, John, 162 Hook, Sidney, 30 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 188, 197, 200, 202 Hughes, Ted, 169 humanism, 80, 91–2 Husserl, Edmund, xvi, 5, 6, 25, 26, 61–5, 70, 75 transcendental ego, 6, 61–2, 65–6, 68, 70, 75–7 idealism (see also ‘philosophy’), 7, 26, 133, 135, 139, 146, 147 ideas, 25–6, 117, 133–4, 137–8, 140–1, 143, 149, 151, 159, 204, 232–3 imagination, 43, 48, 61–2, 65–6, 68, 71–7, 79, 86–8, 107, 108–11, 133–7, 139, 140–1, 143–4, 148–9, 170, 187, 190, 195–6, 206–7, 233 Imagism, 9, 108, 124, 186–7 Indiana, 227 indigenous and ‘indigene’, 5, 25–6, 30–34, 89–91, 211 Ireland, xvii, 2, 3, 15 Italy/Italian, 3, 104, 126, 216–29 Izzo, Carlo, 227–8 Jackson, Andrew, 34 Jacobs, Anthony, xv James, Henry, 3, 130, 228 James, William, 25, 49, 62, 75 Japan, 122 Jarraway, David R., 105 Jarrell, Randall, 228 Java, 122 Jenkins, Lee M., 131, 180 Jennings, Elizabeth, 169 Jerome, St, 6, 95, 97–101 Jin, Huimin, 39 John, Brian, 192 John of Chrysostom, 99

240

Index

John, the Evangelist, St, 42, 45–7, 95 Johnson, Jack, 127 Joyce, James, xv, xvii, 228 Kachel (Stevens), Elsie, 14, 121, 124, 125, 128 Kafka, Franz, 26 Kang, Du-Hyoung, 114 Kant, Immanuel, 62 Keats, John, 15, 42, 199 Kees, Weldon, 177 Kermode, Frank, 92, 162 Keyes, Sidney, 169 Kirkendale, Warren, 95 Klee, Paul, 149 Knopf, Alfred J., 168, 174–7, 180–1, 184 Kotsko, Adam, 39 Kronick, Joseph, 117 Lacan, Jacques, 65 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 214 Ladnier, Tommy, 184 Larkin, Philip, xiii, 8, 169, 174, 179 Jill, 169, 174, 183 North Ship, The, 169, 174 Required Writing, 183 Latimer, Ronald Lane, 135, 148 Lawrence, D. H., 131 Lebanon/Lebanese, 209 Lee, Peter H., 111, 152 Leibniz, Gottfried, 25 Leiris, Michel, 111 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 42–4, 46, 47, 50, 96 Lensing, George, 162, 174, 176, 183, 184 Lentricchia, Frank, 128 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 30 London, 14–15, 125, 186 Longenbach, James, 50, 76 Lorrain, Claude, 122 Lowell, Amy, 124, 227 Lowell, Robert, 165, 228 MacCaig, Norman, 183 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 183 MacGreevy, Thomas (see ‘Thomas McGreevy’) MacLeod, Glen, 131, 142 MacPhee, Angus, 165

Maeder, Beverly, 2 Maessen, Irene, 235 Maine, 13, 24, 30, 39 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 7, 26, 42, 45, 100–1, 103, 109, 113–17, 152, 213 ‘Azur, L’’, 115–16 ‘Éventail (de Madame Mallarmé)’, 100–1 ‘Igitur’, 213 ‘Las de l’amer repos’, 42 Malroux, Claire, 9, 220–5 Maritain, Jacques, 75 Martin, St, 99 Marxism, 33, 44, 91 Masel, Carolyn, 167 Massine, Léonide, 125 Matisse, Henri, 145 McCormick, John, 48 McGreevy, Thomas, xv, 2, 15–16, 17, 76, 134 Mee, Suzi, 21 Melville, Herman, 218 Menand, Louis, 123, 124 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 145, 148 metaphysics (see ‘philosophy’) Meyers, Jerome, 122 Michaels, Walter Benn, 2 Middleton, Christopher, 169 Milan, 216 Miller, Henry, 183 Miller, J. Hillis, 76 Minnesota, 123–6 Modernism (see also separate entries for Modernist movements), xv, xvii, 1, 3, 7, 8, 9, 95–6, 125, 166, 186–7, 205, 207, 227 Mondrian, Piet, 148 Monroe, Harriet, 124, 125, 129, 177 Montague, Gilbert, 50 Moore, G. E., 166, 170 Moore, Marianne, 21, 180 Moore, Nicholas, xv, 8, 9, 165–85 ‘Acrobats in a Red Spotlight’, 184 Book of Priscilla, A, 168, 173 Buzzing Around with a Bee, 168, 173, 175 Cabaret, the Dancer, the Gentleman, The, 168 ‘Death of James Joyce, The’, 177 ‘Elegy for Four Jazz Players’, 184 ‘For My Baby Daughter’, 178

Index ‘Girl with a Wine Glass’, 177 Glass Tower, The, 167, 170, 175, 184 ‘Happy without Sex’, 177–8 ‘Ideas of Disorder at Torquay’, 171 ‘In a Quiet House’, 174 Island and the Cattle, The, 168, 174 Lacrimae Rerum, 183 ‘Last Poem’, 183 ‘Letter from Prison, A’, 173 Longings of the Acrobats, 170 ‘Lovers under the Elms’, 178 ‘Meeting in a Garden’, 178 ‘On the Islets of Langerhans’, 179 ‘Poem’, 172–3 ‘Poem for Billie Holiday’, 184 ‘Poem for the New Year’, 167 Recollections of the Gala, 166, 177–9 Spleen, 179–80, 183 Tall Bearded Iris, The, 166 War of the Little Jersey Cows, The, 166, 176, 177 ‘Waves of Red Balloons, The’, 166, 170 Wish in Season, A, 168, 172, 184 ‘Yesterday’s Sailors’, 170 35 Anonymous Odes, 166, 176 Moore, T. Sturge, 166 Moses, 45 Movement Poets, The, xv, 177 Munich, 17–18 music, 8, 10, 112, 115, 151–62, 231–6 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 108, 111, 214 Narcissus, 44, 111, 112 nativism, 2, 5 Naumann, Francis, 128 Naylor, Paul Kenneth, 75 Nemerov, Howard, 177 Neruda, Pablo, 42 New Apocalypse Poets, The, 168, 179 New Critics, The, 138, 147 New Hampshire, 25 New Jersey, 23, 29, 99 Newton, Douglas, 183 New York City, 14, 30, 121, 125, 186 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xvi, 7, 25, 42–4, 46, 47, 50, 69, 96, 195 Noah, 45, 46 Nolan, Sidney, 165 Norway, 1, 3

241

Oklahoma, 103, 122, 226 ontology (see ‘philosophy’) Orpheus, 161 Orr, Peter, 193 Pach, Walter, 121–2 Pack, Robert, 92 painting (see also separate entries for individual artists), xvii, 7–8, 10, 127, 133–50, 188, 195, 231–6 American Association of Painters and Sculptors, 122 Armory Show, 121–2, 127 Dublin National Gallery, xv, 16 Independents’ Exhibition, The, 127–8 Stevens’ personal art collection, 2, 3, 13, 25, 56, 103 Palermo, 216 Panama, 13, 127 Papini, Giovanni, 228 Paris, 14–15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 121, 125 Parks, Tim, 220–1 Pascal, Blaise, 121 Paul, St, 99 Pavese, Cesare, 218 Penelope, 220–2 Pennsylvania (see also ‘Dutch’ and ‘Germany’), 24, 31, 95, 99–100, 134, 217 Pennsylvania Germans, 24, 31, 37, 99, 217 Perloff, Majorie, 133, 138 Pessoa, Fernando, 209–10, 214 phenomenology (see ‘philosophy’) philosophy (see also separate entries for individual philosophers), 46, 50–1, 61–5, 68, 70, 75, 79–93, 96, 126, 135, 140, 151, 159, 170, 187, 206 epistemology and knowledge, 45–6, 49–51, 53, 56, 143, 147, 159, 188, 189, 191–4, 197, 199, 205, 206, 208, 210–14, 219 existentialism, 91, 201, 210 metaphysics, 50, 52, 61–5, 75–6, 81, 90, 92, 107, 117 phenomenology, xvi, 5, 6, 7, 25, 61–4, 76, 86

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Index

philosophy (see also separate entries for individual philosophers) – continued pragmatism, 62, 65, 76 ontology and being, 65, 69, 72, 75–6, 79–93, 156, 161, 194–5, 202, 205–6, 210–12, 214 Phoebus, 208 Picasso, Pablo, 7–8, 133, 134, 141–3, 145, 148, 149 place (see also ‘America’), 13–22, 24–33, 42, 47, 50, 126, 130–1, 133–4, 148, 199, 205 place-names (international), 3, 122 place-names (American), 5, 24, 31, 96, 122, 125–7, 199, 201 Plath, Sylvia, 169 Plato, 5, 25, 26, 28, 38, 47, 114, 168, 206, 210, 213, 214 Poe, Edgar Allan, 127 poetry/poetics as an act, 153, 158 ‘the ideal’ and, 113–14 ‘foreignness’ of, 79–93 free forms of/‘vers libristes’, 41, 123–4, 165, 207 ‘localism’ and, 126, 131 philosophy and, 65–6, 70, 77, 151, 206–7, 214 poem as object, 46 poetry as subject of, 79, 143 prose and, 107–8, 156 prose poems, 213 pure poetry, 135, 151 qualification as technique in, 42, 66–7, 74–5, 86–7 resemblance in, 109–13 sound effects of, 24, 69–70, 107, 159, 189 voice/speech in, 151–62 Poggioli, Renato, 216, 227 Poland, 3 politics early 20th century, 2, 96, 135 First World War, 121 and literature, 28, 36, 138–9 Second World War, 36, 47, 133–4, 138–9, 172–4, 186 Pollinger, Laurence, 175 Pollmann, Josje, 234 Pope Pius XII, 228

Portugal/Portuguese, 9, 204–15 Pound, Ezra, 3, 41, 42, 130, 166, 180, 186, 227 Powers, James, 15 pragmatism (see ‘philosophy’) Prince, F. T., 169 Proust, Marcel, 146 Raine, Kathleen, 175 Rainey, Lawrence, 123, 124 Ramos Rosa, António, 9, 204–15 ‘Antes do poema’, 207 Aprendiz Secreto, O, 213 Boca incompleta, 207 ‘Constelações’, 205 Construção do corpo, A, 205 Génese, 205 Incêndio dos aspectos, O, 206, 208–9, 214 Livro da ignorância, O, 209–12 Marcas no deserto, As, 208 Palavra e o lugar, A, 204, 207 Poesia, liberdade livre, 207 Poesia moderna, A, 206 ‘Treze poemas inéditos’, 209 Volante verde, 209 Raymond, Marcel, 52 Read, Herbert, 175 Richards, I. A., 34 Riddel, Joseph, 162 Ridler, Anne, 175, 183 Riley, Peter, 170, 172, 178–80, 182, 184 Rimbaud, Arthur, 37, 193 Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 228 Romanticism, 2, 37, 113, 135, 196, 197, 202 post-Romantic, 79, 128, 196 Rome, 5, 9, 17, 21, 47–55, 71, 104–5 Rorem, Ned, 10, 231–4 Russia/Russian, 5, 18, 19–20, 44, 125 Said, Edward, 128 Sandburg, Carl, 227 Santayana, George, xvi, 5, 21, 47–50, 54, 55, 71, 104 Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 50 Middle Span, The, 47 My Host the World, 47, 49 Persons and Places, 47, 49 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, 204, 209

Index Sappho, 214 Scandinavia, 126 Schaum, Melita, 138 Schlegel, Friedrich, 7, 113–14, 117, 227 ‘On Incomprehensibility’, 117 Philosophical Fragments, 113–14 Schmidt, Michael, xiii Schwartz, Delmore, 148 Scurfield, George, 175 Second World War (see ‘politics’) Seferis, George, 183 Serio, John, 4 Shadwell, Thomas, 169 Shakespeare, William, 41 Shapiro, Karl, 228 Sharpe, Tony, 126 Shaw, George Bernard, 14 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 37, 42 Simons, Hi, 105, 114, 115 Sinclair, Iain, 178 Sisyphus, 115 Smart, Elizabeth, 183 Smith, Timothy d’Arch, 168–9, 175, 176, 182 Smith, William Jay, 124, 125 Socrates, 54 Spain/Spanish, 3, 19–21, 47, 104, 205, 214 Spectrism, 124 Statkiewicz, Max, 214 Stein, Gertrude, 3, 127 Steiner, George, 165 Stétié, Salah, 209 Stevens, Elsie (see ‘Kachel’) Stevens, Holly, xvi, xvii, 21, 22, 48, 131, 217 Stevens, Wallace, (see also ‘Wallace Stevens (in translation)’) ‘Academic Discourse at Havana’, 42 ‘Adagia’, 8, 13, 24, 42, 108, 112, 135, 156, 158, 192, 206, 212 ‘American Sublime, The’, 199 ‘Anecdote of Men by the Thousand’, 126, 131 ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, 7, 23, 31, 91, 123, 129–30, 181 ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans’, 149 ‘Architecture’, 213 ‘Asides on the Oboe’, 168, 173–4, 181 ‘As You Leave the Room’, 86–7

243

‘Auroras of Autumn, The’, 5, 25, 28–34, 43, 213, 226 Auroras of Autumn, The, xvi, 7, 99, 228 ‘Autumn Refrain’, 15, 42, 162 ‘Blue Buildings in the Summer Air, The’, 168 ‘Bouquet, The’, 212–13 ‘Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight’, 76 ‘Candle a Saint, The’, 136 ‘Canonica’, 134 ‘Carnet de Voyage’, 121 ‘Certain Phenomena of Sound’, 95 ‘Child Asleep in Its Own Life, A’, 231 ‘Chocorua to Its Neighbor’, 211 ‘Clear Day and No Memories, A’, 80, 84–6, 89, 231 Collected Poems, xvi, 23, 24, 25, 183, 193 ‘Collect of Philosophy, A’, 20, 48, 50, 77 ‘Comedian as the Letter C, The’, 7, 31, 107–8, 117, 122–3, 128, 130, 191 ‘Contrary Theses (II)’, 181 ‘Course of a Particular, The’, 85, 197, 199 ‘Creations of Sound, The’, 8, 152, 160–1 ‘Credences of Summer’, 23, 102, 197 ‘Death of a Soldier, The’, 173 ‘Description Without Place’, 2, 4, 5, 18, 20, 25, 42–47, 50, 55, 56, 96, 122, 138 ‘Discovery of Thought, A’, 206 ‘Dish of Peaches in Russia, A’, 5, 18, 19–20 ‘Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock’, 181 ‘Domination of Black’, 167, 181 ‘Dove in Spring, The’, 231 ‘Earthy Anecdote’, 181, 226–7 ‘Effects of Analogy’, 157–8 ‘Emperor of Ice-Cream, The’, 181, 194–5 ‘Esthétique du Mal’, 42, 53, 176, 179–80 Esthétique du Mal, 174, 175 ‘Evening Without Angels’, 195 ‘Examination of the Hero in a Time of War’, 66–7 ‘Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas’, 85, 212

244

Index

Stevens, Wallace, (see also ‘Wallace Stevens (in translation)’) – continued ‘Farewell to Florida’, 135, 181 ‘Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet, The’, 77, 138–9, 158, 207 ‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’, 181 ‘Flyer’s Fall’, 181 ‘From Pieces of Paper’, 13, 15, 21 ‘From the Journal of Crispin’, 130 ‘Gubbinal’, 208–9 Harmonium, 3, 4, 7, 61, 65, 95, 123, 167, 181, 187, 208, 226, 227 ‘High-Toned Old Christian Woman, A’, 7, 195 ‘Holiday in Reality’, 181 ‘Idea of Order at Key West, The’, 8, 152, 159, 171, 197–200 Ideas of Order, xvi, 174, 181 ‘Idiom of the Hero, The’, 181, 221 ‘Imagination as Value’, 48–9, 158 ‘Infanta Marina’, 181 ‘Invective Against Swans’, 181 ‘Irish Cliffs of Moher, The’, 5, 16 ‘Irrational Element in Poetry, The’, 1, 137–8 ‘July Mountain’, 205 ‘Landscape with Boat’, 114–16 ‘Large Red Man Reading’, 8, 23, 37, 161 ‘Latest Freed Man, The’, 64, 91 ‘Lebensweisheitspielerei’, 77 ‘Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit’, 92 ‘Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery’, 38, 41 ‘Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly’, 102 ‘Man Carrying Thing’, 206 ‘Man on the Dump, The’, 37 ‘Man with the Blue Guitar, The’, 8, 89, 113, 134–7, 140–4, 145, 148, 189, 192, 211, 216 ‘Memorandum’, 96 ‘Metaphors of a Magnifico’, 2 ‘Monocle de Mon Oncle, Le’, 42, 45, 167, 196 ‘Mozart, 1935’, 159 ‘Mrs. Alfred Uruguay’, 38, 168 Necessary Angel, The, 23, 77

‘News and the Weather, The’, 133 ‘Noble Rider and the Sound of Words, The’, 23, 29, 34, 35–6, 76, 113, 137–8, 174 ‘No Possum, No Sop, No Taters’, 213 ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, xv, xvi, 4, 6, 7, 25, 36–8, 42, 50, 53, 85, 88, 95, 101, 115–16, 141, 145, 149, 168, 173, 176, 200, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210 Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, 133, 138, 174 ‘Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself’, 193–4, 199, 231 ‘Novel, The’, 5, 16 ‘Nuances of a Theme by Williams’, xvii, 7, 108–13 ‘Oak Leaves Are Hands’, 38 ‘Of Hartford in a Purple Light’, 1 ‘Of Mere Being’, 6, 79–84, 88, 227, 231 ‘Old Lutheran Bells at Home, The’, 99, 101, 103, 104 ‘Old Man Asleep, An’, 68–9 ‘On Receiving the Gold Medal from the Poetry Society of America’, 151 ‘On the Way to the Bus’, 218–19 Opus Posthumous, xiv ‘Ordinary Evening in New Haven, An’, 7, 16, 96–8, 102, 103, 113, 149, 205, 206 ‘Our Stars Come from Ireland’, 15, 134 ‘Owl in the Sarcophagus, The’, 226 ‘Owl’s Clover’, 135–6 Owl’s Clover, 174 Palm at the End of the Mind, The, xvi, 80 ‘Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage, The’, 181 ‘Parochial Theme’, 35 Parts of a World, 38, 134, 136, 174, 176, 181, 183 ‘Pastor Caballero, The’, 181 ‘Pecksniffiana’, 7, 130 ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’, 167, 181, 202 ‘Plain Sense of Things, The’, 71–5, 79, 84–86, 207–8 ‘Planet on the Table, The’, 225, 231 ‘Plot Against the Giant, The’, 181 ‘Prelude to Objects’, 8, 134, 144–8

Index ‘Primitive Like an Orb, A’, 80, 81, 83–5, 89–90, 101, 102 ‘Primordia’, 7, 125–8, 131 ‘Quiet Normal Life, A’, 149 ‘Reply to Papini’, 228 ‘River of Rivers in Connecticut, The’, xvi, 5, 24–8, 231, 234 ‘Rock, The’, xvi, 216–17 Rock, The, 65, 68, 70, 104 ‘Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz’, 158–9 ‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds’, 42 Selected Poems, xv, 21, 176, 180–1, 187 ‘Snow Man, The’, 72, 74–5, 80, 85, 188–9, 197 ‘So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch’, 77 ‘Someone Puts a Pineapple Together’, 46, 110 ‘Sunday Morning’, 31, 39, 52, 54, 98, 126, 167, 173, 201 ‘Thinking of a Relation between the Images of Metaphors’, 24 ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, 24, 167, 187, 191–2 ‘This Solitude of Cataracts’, 24–5 ‘Thought Revolved, A’, 143 ‘Three Academic Pieces’, 110, 111 Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise, 125 ‘Thunder by the Musician’, 168 ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’, 5, 9, 21, 47–55, 71, 104–5, 218–19, 222, 228 ‘To the One of Fictive Music’, 112–13 Transport to Summer, 7, 168, 174 ‘Two Figures in Dense Violet Night’, 167 ‘Two or Three Ideas’, 157–8 ‘Ultimate Poem Is Abstract, The’, 84 ‘Variations on a Summer Day’, 8, 24, 152, 159–60 ‘Woman That Had More Babies Than That, The’, 170–1 ‘World as Meditation, The’, 20, 199, 203, 220–2 ‘Yellow Afternoon’, 168 Stevens, Wallace (in translation), À l’instant de quitter la pièce. Le Rocher et derniers poèmes, 220–5 Angelo necessario. Saggi sulla realtà e l’immaginazione, L’, 216, 217

245

Aurore d’autunno, 217 Harmonium. Poesie 1915–1955, 217 Mattino domenicale ed altre poesie, 216, 227 Mondo come meditazione, Il, 216, 217–18 Note verso una suprema finzione, 216 Stieglitz, Alfred, 127 Stockholm, 17 Straumann, Heinrich, xv Strom, Martha, 107, 117 Sturgis, George, 48 supreme fiction (and the ‘fictive’), 35–8, 43, 50, 77, 113, 114, 117, 135, 148, 167, 188, 189, 195, 199, 207, 213 Surrealism, 37, 142, 168 Sutherland, Graham, 175 Sweden, 3, 15, 126 Sweeney, John, 16, 181 Swigg, Richard, 187 Switzerland, xv, 3, 13, 15, 42 Symbolism, 2, 3, 9, 108, 109, 113–14, 151, 186–7, 193 Symons, Julian, xv, 143, 166 Tal-Coat, Pierre, 149 Tambimuttu, 8, 170, 175–6, 180, 184 Tate, Allen, 138 Taylor, Wilson E., 150 Tennessee, 31, 122, 129–30 Tennyson, (Lord) Alfred, 41 Thomas, Dylan, 168, 169, 175, 177 Thoreau, Henry David, 2 Tomlinson, Charles, 8–9, 186–203 American Scenes and Other Poems, 198 ‘Antecedents: A Homage and Valediction’, 192–3 ‘Art of Poetry, The’, 188, 190–1 ‘Cézanne at Aix’, 195 ‘Clouds’, 203 ‘Eight Observations on the Nature of Eternity’, 187 ‘Hill, The’, 198–99 Necklace, The, 187, 188, 190 ‘Nine Variations in a Chinese Winter Setting’, 187, 191–2 ‘Observation of Facts’, 190 ‘Praeludium, II.’, 193 Relations and Contraries, 190 Seeing is Believing, 186, 192

246

Index

Tomlinson, Charles – continued Some Americans: A Personal Record, 186–8 ‘Something: A Direction’, 193–4 ‘Suggestions for the Improvement of a Sunset’, 187 ‘Swimming Chenango Lake’, 199–202 ‘Wallace Stevens and the Poetry of Scepticism’, 195–9, 201–2 Transatlantic (features of), 1–2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 23, 26, 28, 30, 38, 41–2, 62, 103, 108, 121–2, 133–4, 145, 149, 152, 173, 181, 186, 205 transcendental (for ‘transcendental ego’, see ‘Husserl’), 2, 26, 61–3, 68, 114 translation, xvi, 4, 9, 165, 216–29 Treece, Henry, 168, 183 Trotsky, Leon, 44 Truman, Harry S., 97 Turin, 216 Tyler, Parker, 168, 177 Ulysses, 220–1 United Kingdom (see ‘England’, ‘Wales’, etc.) United States (see America) Valéry, Paul, 8, 41, 103, 151–62, 193 Eupalinos ou l’Architecte, 162 ‘Poésie et pensée abstraite’, 161 ‘Première leçon au cours de poétique’, 153 Vendler, Helen, 130, 197 Venturi, Lionello, 146–7 Verrocchio, Andrea del, 34 Vidal, Anatole, 15, 149 Vidal, Paule, 15, 149 Wahl, Jean, 25, 139 Wain, John, xv Wales/Welsh, 177 Warren, Robert Penn, 177 Washington, George, 112 Weinfield, Henry, 117 Weinstock, Herbert, 181

West, Rebecca, 124 Wharton, Edith, 3 Whiting, Anthony, 117 Whitman, Walt, 2, 41, 127, 176 Wilbur, Richard, 23 Williams, Charles, 175 Williams, Ellen, 124 Williams, Oscar, 180 Williams, Paul Wightman, 174 Williams, William Carlos, 2, 5, 7, 9, 23–4, 28–9, 34–5, 37, 39, 41, 108–12, 117, 122–3, 126, 128–30, 131, 144, 186–7, 227 Al Que Quiere!, 109, 128 ‘El Hombre’, 109–10 In the American Grain, 112, 131 Kora in Hell, 131 Paterson, 29, 34–5, 37, 39 ‘Place, Any Place, to Transcend All Places, A’, 123 ‘Sea Elephant, The’, 23 Williamson, Dennis, 181 Wills, David, 39 Wilson, Dick, 184 Wilson, Edmund, 44, 47 Europe without Baedeker, 49 To the Finland Station, 44 Wiman, Christian, 76 Winters, Yvor, 197, 228 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 64 Woolf, Virginia, 220 Wordsworth, William, 41, 42, 43, 166, 20 Woudenberg, Hans, 231, 235 Yeats, William Butler, 7, 30, 96–7, 166, 196 Young, Alan, 186 Zambrano, María, 214 Zeller, John, 95 Zenith, Richard, 214 Zervos, Christian, 142 Zilczer, Judith K., 127 Zurich, xiii, 42–3

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Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens (Bloom's Major Poets)

Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things

Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode

A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens

Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

Serita Stevens - The Unborn

Secrets- The Wallace Family

Irving Wallace - The Prize

Writing Race Across the Atlantic World, 1492-1789

Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Irving Wallace - The Man

Stevens, Bob - Henry's Power

Garfield Reeves-Stevens - Bloodshift

Stevens, Amanda - Bedroom Window

The Atlantic Abomination

Looking for Rachel Wallace

Looking for Rachel Wallace

Looking for Rachel Wallace

David Foster Wallace

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Looking for Rachel Wallace

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Poetry and Repetition: Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

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