The Poetry of Stevens by Wallace Stevens

First published:Harmonium, 1932; Ideas of Order, 1935; Owl’s Clover, 1936; The Man with the Blue Guitar, 1937; Parts of a World, 1942; Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, 1942; Esthetique du Mal, 1945; Transport to Summer, 1947; Three Academic Pieces, 1947; A Primitive Like an Orb, 1948; The Auroras of Autumn, 1952; The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 1954

Critical Evaluation:

Wallace Stevens’ poetry has been called both “elegant” and “austere.” It has been criticized for “an air of sumptuousness, chic, expensiveness, ’conspicuous consumption,’” as well as for bleakness, abstractness, a lack of personal warmth. Neither of these criticisms, however, says much about Stevens, who, according to Northrop Frye, was a rhetorician and therefore expendable, but an essential poet.

Stevens’ first and perhaps most “elegant,” least “austere,” volume of poems, HARMONIUM, was unlike many first volumes in that it contained statements of all the major themes to appear in his later books. HARMONIUM, in other words, was a mature work, differing from the later volumes largely in manner rather than meaning. Thus, throughout Stevens’ poetry, whether early or late, one observes recurrent elements: a love for precise language resulting in a selection of words at once elegant and austere; a celebration of the imagination and the power of human creativity; a highly abstract, careful examination of different theories of perception and knowledge couched in highly concrete, colorful, often playful language; and a continuing concern for the myth-making capabilities of poetry in a world of defunct myths.

In IDEAS OF ORDER and THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR, Stevens made a perceptible step toward austerity in statement of theme and in technique, although the themes were the same as those in HARMONIUM. Thus, the title poem of the second volume (containing also “Owl’s Clover,” “A Thought Revolved,” and “The Men That Are Falling”) consists of a series of thirty-three re-evaluations of the position of the artist and the meaning of art in a world of “things as they are,” a phrase equivalent to the “ding an sich” of the earlier “The Comedian as the Letter C.” However, instead of Crispin the Comedian’s symbolic journey representing the various philosophical metamorphoses of an artist in a world of “ding an sich,” the guitar player in the later poem plucks out various types of “fictive music” corresponding to varying definitions of poetry. Crispin moves from definition to definition in the course of his journey; the guitar player appears to pose all thirty-three variations of “things as they are” without an exact progression. As in “The Comedian as the Letter C,” the guitar player is confronted by a world of fact and matter which he transmutes—or tries to transmute—even though they are greatly changed by the player—the artist, the disciplined imagination, the passion for order—on the blue guitar. That they are changed is known; just how they are changed, and to what degree, becomes the central puzzle in a poem dealing at once with aesthetics, epistemology, and something similar to Coleridge’s “poetic faith.” The general conclusion is the recognition of the importance of poetry as source for “order” and meaning in a world of dazzling, jumbled, apparently purposeless objects—a world without clear meaning. Although it may be that, given the myth-making importance of poetry in a mythless world, the oet cannot entirely succeed in making fact and matter meaningful.

This is Stevens’ central quandary: How can the imagination (another word for poetry) fulfill man’s craving for beauty, order, and meaning in a world—depending on the point of view—antipathetic to imagination? And Stevens’ answers—depending on the poem—are plural, operating as logical alternatives. Thus, at times, no problem seems to arise at all, for “the imagination” may be the only thing which is real in an imagined world. This is the possibility or alternative which gives rise to section XXV of “Blue Guitar,” wherein the hero flings and twirls the world. It is, however, only one possibility, the most playful and optimistic, among thirty-three. Perhaps the simplest statement that can be made about “Blue Guitar,” then, is that the basis of the poem is poetry — as it is of all of Stevens’ work—“poetry” meaning human perception and creativity (one and the same) rather than words on a page.

Stevens’ 1935 volume, IDEAS OF ORDER, contains no poems of the length of “Blue Guitar,” but a number of excellent short meditative lyrics such as “Academic Discourse at Havana,” “Evening without Angels,” and “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Here, Stevens also asks questions leading to an investigation of poetry. Often the form of Stevens’ poems becomes a question about the nature of imagination or reality followed by an answer (always tentative or conditional) or series of answers.

Stevens’ following volume, PARTS OF A WORLD, continues his examination of poetry, as the titles of some of the poems therein indicate: “Poetry Is a Destructive Force,” or, “The Poems of Our Climate.” The admired, much-cited “Connoisseur of Chaos” is contained in this volume. The “connoisseur,” the poet, Stevens and reader, live, perhaps, mostly in a world of disorder, rather than in the largely historical, now hard-to-come-by world which, having the advantages of “order,” has also the disadvantage of dogma.

In the same year as PARTS OF A WORLD appeared a long, difficult poem, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” Therein Stevens, in three sections, defines the qualities such a “fiction” must have: “It Must Be Abstract,” “It Must Change,” and “It Must Give Pleasure.” These statements would be simple enough if Stevens were talking about poetry on a page. He is, however, talking about poetry and “fiction” as reality, or poetry as the perception of reality, and consequently “supreme fiction” comes to mean several analogous products of imagination: “the first idea” or “Logos,” the created world, the first man, “the idea of man,” and, by extension, the imaginative creation which takes place in a human mind. Hence, the qualities which Stevens defines in his three sections are not so much qualities which a poem on a page must have as they are qualities which existence must, and does, have. In “Notes,” too, appears the conflict which exists between fact and matter. This conflict explains why Stevens, praising poetry, appears to say that poetry gets in our way.

TRANSPORT TO SUMMER includes “Notes” and also “Esthetique du Mal,” a poem similar to “The Comedian as the Letter C,” in which a poet tries to reconcile a comfortable philosophy or “esthetic” with “pain” and the destructiveness symbolized by Mt. Vesuvius. This comfortable philosophy, “his book,” is akin to the romantic theory of the sublime and to the “esthetique du mal” nineteenth century style. We shrink from real pain, the real volcano, and the fact of death. The poet and the poem seek out an “esthetique du mal” which will not shrink or falter, but arrive face to face with “ding an sich” and fact and matter as they are, finding a genuine aesthetic merely in living life as it is. All comfortable philosophies and panaceas Stevens counters with “ding an sich.”

THREE ACADEMIC PIECES, containing “The Realm of Resemblance,” “Someone Puts a Pineapple Together,” and “Of Ideal Time and Choice,” deals, as the title indicates, almost didactically, but always playfully and elegantly, with the nature of poetry. These pieces were included in the later collection of prose and verse lecture-essays, THE NECESSARY ANGEL, wherein, with a prose style very much like his poetry, Stevens continues to examine art, the subtitle reading, “Essays on Reality and the Imagination.”

THE AURORAS OF AUTUMN, which won for Stevens his first National Book Award, includes, besides the title poem, “A Primitive Like an Orb” (published separately in 1948), “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” and “Things of August.” If there is drama in “Ordinary Evening,” or in most of Stevens’s poetry, it is the drama of thought, of re-evaluation and redefinition as in “Blue Guitar.” The problem, if imagination is the only reality, is solipsism.

The solution, as elsewhere, tentative, conditional, ironic, is poetry. That is, ironically, in an imagined world poetry offers reality, offers the antidote to imagination, to “romance” and “illusion” and “esthetiques du mal” which do not include all parts of the “sublime.” But is poetry able to dispense with tropisms and offer only a “pure reality”? Is it not, finally, the “supreme fiction,” merely the illusion of disillusion, the ultimate and hence least real product of the imagination? If so, then reality is also the ultimate product of the imagination, and therefore poetry and reality are one—the same dream or the same fact, whatever one may wish to call it. In any case, what one imagines, what one perceives, what one is, do not depend on the implication that reality is an actuality, or on the implication that imagination produces unreality, but only on changing ideas and on facing them directly or indirectly.

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WALLACE STEVENS contains most of the poetry which appeared in his previous volumes, with the exception of “Owl’s Clover,” which Stevens thought unsuccessful, and two poems from PARTS OF A WORLD, “The Woman That Had More Babies than That” and “Life on a Battleship.” It also contained a long section, written when he was about seventy, called “The Rock.” There, in poems such as “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself” and “Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination,” Stevens continued his examinations of poetry. There are overtones of the problems of age and death, but such overtones appeared even in HARMONIUM, and a reading of Stevens from early to late reveals little change in outlook, though increasing perfection of style and language, and perhaps an increasing preference for meditative lyrics, of which “Sunday Morning” is the greatest early example. There followed OPUS POSTHUMOUS, edited by S. F. Morse, drawing together unpublished pieces, Stevens’ notebook adages, occasional lectures, and Stevens’ early verse plays, “Carlos Among the Candles” and “Three Travellers Watch the Sunrise.”

Stevens could write that life is composed of theories about life, and he might also have added that poetry consists of propositions about poetry. Thus Stevens no doubt sounds like the first section of “Notes”: “It Must Be Abstract.” But while Stevens is “abstract” and does build poetry out of “propositions,” that poetry rarely if ever has the dryness of prose philosophy, and is among the most exciting, original, and, as Northrop Frye might say, “essential” verse of modern times.

Bibliography

Bates, Milton J. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003.

Cleghorn, Angus J. Wallace Stevens’ Poetics: The Neglected Rhetoric. New York: Palgrave, 2000.

Critchley, Simon. Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Ford, Sara J. Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens: The Performance of Modern Consciousness. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Leggett, B. J. Late Stevens: The Final Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.

Morse, Samuel F. Wallace Stevens: Poetry as Life. New York: Pegasus, 1970.

Santilli, Kristine S. Poetic Gesture: Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the Motions of Poetic Language. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Sharpe, Tony. Wallace Stevens: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.