An Ultimatum for Poetry

Wallance Stevens

Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on October 2, 1879, and died at the age of seventy-six in Hartford, Connecticut on August 2, 1955. He attended Harvard as a special student from 1897 to 1900 but did not graduate; he graduated from New York law school in 1903 and was admitted to the New York bar in 1904, the year he met Elsie Kachel, a young woman from Reading, whom he married in 1909. They had one daughter, Holly Bight, born in 1924, conceived on a leisurely ocean voyage California via the Panama Canal that they took to celebrate the publication of his first book.

Stevens became interested in verse-writing at Harvard, submitting material to the Harvard Advocate, but he would be 36 before his first work was published in 1915. He soon was contributing to Poetry (Chicago), and his first book Harmonium was published in 1923 by the distinguished firm of Alfred A. Knopf. Though he was always much admired by his contemporaries ("There is a man whose work," Hart Crane wrote of him in 1919, "makes most the rest of us quail"), Stevens felt that the reviews of his 1923 book were less than they should be, and discouraged, wrote nothing through the 1920s. For a second edition of Harmonium, published in 1931, he added only eight new poems.

If he was not writing in the 1920s, he was steadily advancing in business. After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, he had been hired as a bonding lawyer for an insurance firm in 1908, and by 1914 was hired as the vice-president of the New York Office of the Equitable Surety Co. of St. Louis. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain the rest of his life. By 1934, he had been named Vice President of his company.

All his life Stevens collected art from abroad and saw that packages of various gourmet foods were mailed to him regularly. Although he regularly traveled in the South, most notably to Florida and the Florida Keys and Cuba, he never ventured abroad. But his cosmopolitan yearnings were amply satisfied by regular jaunts to New York City. Trains leaving Hartford on a better-than-hourly basis guaranteed that any Saturday he could be on the streets of New York City by 10 a.m. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was welcomed as a member of the exclusive set centered around the artistic and literary devotees Barbara and Henry Church.

When Stevens began to write poems with renewed fluency in the 1930s, he arranged for them to be printed in limited editions at the same time as trade editions were prepared by Knopf. Ideas of Order (1935) and Owl’s Clover (1937) were limited editions by the Alcestis Press, while The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937) and Parts of a World (1942) were printed by Knopf, and Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1942) and Esthetique du Mal were deluxe volumes issued by the Cummington Press in 1942.

In 1939, Stevens was sixty – an age when most poets are ready to look back on what career they might have made for themselves. But Stevens’s best writing still lay before him in the form of extended meditative sequences, quasi-philosophical in their ruminative wanderings but marked always by a vivid sense of the absurd and a darting, whirling inventiveness that took delight in peculiar anecdotal examples. In the loosely connected stanzas of these sequences, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" (1942), "Esthetique du Mal" (1945), "The Auroras of Autumn" (1947) and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" (1950), Stevens perfected what had been, in effect, the work he had been producing all along – a metapoetry that took lavish delight in commenting upon its own making. At the same time, he began to grow interested in putting his thoughts on aesthetics together in prose sentences, essays he collected in 1951 as The Necessary Angel. And there was one final, magnificent turn to his development. Entering his seventies, he began to write a poetry of late old age, in which a sense of the disembodied, the purely mental, gave rise to a discourse that had grown newly austere, solemn, and strange even to its author.

Capturing so exuberantly yet so flawlessly the mind at play with an extravagance most often associated with youthful pleasure, with the sheer delights of the sensual body, Stevens preferred to mask his very great sensual satisfactions by suggesting that his doings were in fact all a highly proper set of speculations on "the imagination." (His prose essays were useful allies in this strategy.) But the sheer verve of local moments, the sumptuous texture of outstanding passages, simply dissolves as pretense the notion that a philosophical enterprise might be underway. Few poets have so fully enjoyed not just their indulgence in their own language but also the game that elaborately insists no such indulgence is occurring.

Heather McHugh (Poet)

I know he's too abstruse for many... and it's true that he's more interested in ideas than many people think is proper for a poet. But he's a stunningly sensual thinker... and that sensuality always wowed me... had the power to move me well before I was as avid for ideas as I am now... As a child I could FEEL the power in lines like "The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down"—those lines were power lines: they thrummed with image and music—they trembled with palpable sensuality.

I grew to love his cool-eyed poems, too, his drive to see without swamping the seen in gluey attachments. And so he kept pace with my own capacities to love:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
the spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind...
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

(The Snow Man)

I came to love his literalness, his taste for letters and signs; his turning the poem into its own object (blurring of the distinction between object and subject); his sense of the magnetic attraction between word and word, between meaning and means. When I first read him I was dazzled by his audacities.

Who ever ended a poem with a sentence like "The the."? That's how "The Man on the Dump" ends: "Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the." My god, in my teens and early twenties, I couldn't stop re-reading that ending! The astonishingly questionable, downright definiteness of that article! The hammer blows of those grammars!

In my heart (if not in my brain) I understood

...shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The ABC of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

(lines which are so full of SIGNage, brands, demands, letters, kisses, chromosomes, forges, and forces... ).

What reader wouldn't love a title like "Large Red Man Reading"? It begins "There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases" (an ordinary enough poetic set-up) but ends:

The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:
Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,
Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,
Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are
And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.

The lines spoke the feeling for them! Take that, o you who do not feel.

Later I grew to love his capacity for balancing high philosophical seeking with low comedy, pure preposterousness, outright hilariousness, and daring artifice:

The Ultimate Poem is Abstract

This day writhes with what? The lecturer
On This Beautiful World Of Ours composes himself
And hems the planet rose and haws it ripe,

And red, and right. The particular question—here
The particular answer to the particular question
Is not in point—the question is in point.

If the day writhes, it is not with revelations.
One goes on asking questions. That, then, is one
Of the categories. So said, this placid space

Is changed. It is not so blue as we thought. To be blue,
There must be no questions. It is an intellect
Of windings around and dodges to and fro,

Writhings in wrong obliques and distances,
Not an intellect in which we are fleet: present
Everywhere in space at once, cloud-pole

Of communication. 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.

Do you notice how he permits himself to have fun with words? "Writhings in wrong" can't help suggesting lurking understudies like "writing" and "right"... and the curved line of the question mark itself, which comes to its point.

If you really want to have some fun, take a look at the pseudo-critical art-history talking points and psychotherapeutic sleights-of-hand, even the ultimate Jimmy Durante lowbrow stage-jokiness at the end of So-and-So Reclining On Her Couch:

On her side, reclining on her elbow.
This mechanism, this apparition,
Suppose we call it Projection A.

She floats in air at the level of
The eye, completely anonymous,
Born, as she was, at twenty-one,

Without lineage or language, only
The curving of her hip, as motionless gesture,
Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.

If just above her heard there hung,
Suspended in air, the slightest crown
Of Gothic prong and practick bright,

The suspension, as in solid space,
The suspending hand withdrawn, would be
An invisible gesture. Let this be called

Projection B. To get at the thing
Without gestures is to get at it as
Idea. She floats in the contention, the flux

Between the thing as idea and
The idea as thing. She is half who made her.
This is the final projection, C.

The arrangement contains the desire of
The artist. But one confides in what has no
Concealed creator. One walks easily

The unpainted shore, accepts the world
As anything but sculpture. Good-bye,
Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.

"What should we be," writes Stevens in "Men Made Out Of Words," "without the sexual myth,/The human revery or poem of death?//Castratos of moon-mash—"

Castratos of moon-mash??? Where else will you find language like that, I ask you???

Add to all of these his wildness and urbanity; his willingness to haul into the comedy of aesthetics a bald-faced outright reference to popular art's sturm und drang and stagey sentiment. Stevens is a stage magician; and always, behind his skepticism about the distortions of nature by human senses, his underlying persistent impulse to return to natural events and objects for his metaphysical reflections:

Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion

Oh, that this lashing wind was something more
Than the spirit of Ludwig Richter....

The rain is pouring down. It is July.
There is lightning and the thickest thunder.

It is a spectacle. Scene 10 becomes 11,
In Series X, Act IV, et cetera.

People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,
Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old,

The air is full of children, statues, roofs
And snow. The theatre is spinning round,

Colliding with deaf-mute churches and optical trains.
The most massive sopranos are singing songs of scales.

And Ludwig Richter, turbulent Schlemihl,
Has lost the whole in which he was contained,

Knows desire without an object of desire,
All mind and violence and nothing felt.

He knows he has nothing more to think about,
Like the wind that lashes everything at once.

The thunder is thick for the same reason that the eyes were "dripping blue"—because they are painted. This is art made of art: Behind it all is his drive to feel his way, with art, through art: to see THROUGH human senses (doomed enterprise, he knows) to the underlying dilemmas of consciousness; its sayings and seemings; its love affair with fact and foolings around; its heights and downfalls; its farces and foibles; its self-constructions and its self-delusions...

I love him for supplying the best response of all, to those who would tear down the music hall in which he does his études:

Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.

If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.

That lucid souvenir of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of future,
The unclouded concerto...
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.

That's my boy. He's fiery and icy; he's whacky and wise. I can't say I always understand him, inside out, but I do love him, through and through.

(Please visit http//Englizona.blogspot.com for powerful poems.