Wallace Stevens ALLACE STEVENS was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, October 2, 1879. A stu W dent at Harvard University and New York Law School, he was admitted to the Bar in 1904 and engaged in the general practice of law in New York City. In 1916 he became associated with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, of which he became vice-president in 1934. A poet of peculiar reticence, he kept himself from book publication for a long and rigorous time. Although many of his poems appeared as early as 1913, he was so self-critical that he refused to publish a volume until 1923 when the first edition of Harmonium appeared. The most casual reading of this volume discloses that Stevens is a stylist of unusual delicacy. Even the least sympathetic reader must be struck by the poet's hypersensitive and ingenious imagination. It is a curiously ambiguous world which Stevens paints: a world of merging half-lights, of finicking shadows, of disembodied emotions. Even this last word is an exaggeration, for emotion itself seems absent from the clear and often fiercely colored segments of the poet's designs. Considered as a painter, Stevens is one of the most original impressionists of the times. He is fond of little blocks of color, verbal mosaics in which syllables are used as pigments. Little related to any human struggle, the content of Harmonium progresses toward a sort of “absolute" poetry which, depending on tone rather than on passion, aims to flower in an air of pure estheticism. His very titles-which deliberately add to the reader's confusion by having little or no connection with most of the poems-betray this quality: "Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion," "The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage," "Frogs Eat Butterflies, Snakes Eat Frogs, Hogs Eat Snakes, Men Eat Hogs." Such poems have much for the eye, something for the ear, but little for that central hunger which is at the core of all the senses. Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan Of tan with henna hackles, halt! Thus Stevens begins his "Bantam in Pine-Woods" and his pleasure in playing with sounds must be evident to the most perplexed reader. Like Williams, to whose Collected Poems Stevens furnished an introduction, Stevens is interested in things chiefly from their "unreal” aspect. He is, nevertheless, romantic. A romantic poet nowadays,' says Stevens, "happens to be one who still dwells in an ivory tower, but who insists that life there would be intolerable except for the fact that one has, from the top, such an exceptional view of the public dump and the advertising signs. . . . He is the hermit who dwells alone with the sun and moon, and insists on taking a rotten newspaper." That is why Stevens can write of "The Worms at Heaven's Gate" with no disrespect to Shakespeare, make a study in esthetics of the contents of a cab, and entitle a poem on death ("the finale of seem") "The Emperor of Ice-Cream." "Sunday Morning" and "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" are blends of disintegrated fantasy and fictitious reality. These poems are highly selective in choice of allusions, inner harmonies, and special luxuriance of sound. They burst into strange bloom; they foliate in a region where the esthetic impulse encroaches on the reasoning intellect. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and "Domination of Black" have a delicacy of design which suggests the Chinese; "Peter Quince at the Clavier" and the exquisite "To the One of Fictive Music" (Stevens' most obviously musical moment) reveal a distinction which places "this auditor of insects, this lutanist of fleas" as one who has perfected a kind of poetry which is a remarkable, if strangely hermetic, art. After a twelve years' silence Stevens published Ideas of Order (1935) in a limited edition. The format of the book and its private publication emphasizes the limitation as well as the elegance of the contents. Here, as in Harmonium, Stevens seldom writes poetry about the Ding an sich, but almost always about the overtones which the thing creates in his mind. Here the candid surface breaks into cryptic epigrams, and the scenes are recorded in a deft but elusive phrase. Often enough a poem refuses to yield its meaning, but "Academic Discourse at Havana" and "The Idea of Order at Key West" surrender themselves in an almost pure music. The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), with a bow to Picasso, places its emphasis on man as artist and on the complicated relations between art and life. It is a far cry from the delight in luxuriance for its own sake which Stevens once called "the essential gaudiness of poetry." There is little mischievous playing with the sound of words, as in the much-quoted line (from "The Emperor of Ice-Cream") which had the "roller of big cigars" whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. There is, instead, an increasing concern with the problem of a society in chaos and the difficult "idea of order." Stevens has sacrified some of the barbaric piling up of effects; his work is no longer a pageant of colors, sounds, and smells. The riotousness has been replaced by a grave awareness of the plight of man. Without losing the wit and delicacy of what Allen Tate has characterized as "floating images," Stevens has gained compassion. A new preoccupation with man's bewilderment and despair strengthens Stevens' later work. The poet's "place" is established by critical estimates in the Wallace Stevens number of The Harvard Advocate (December, 1940), and his own attitude is clearly pronounced in "Asides on the Oboe❞ from that issue. Without discarding the early resonance and free play of associations, he hails the provoked intelligence: The impossible possible philosopher's man, The man who has had the time to think enough. Stevens has never been more pointed than in his later poems, which are both rhetorical and profound. He is the transparence of the place in which He is, and in his poems we find peace. But Stevens does not insist that peace is to be found in poetry. The "central man" finds no panacea but "the sum of men the central evil, the central good." ... ANECDOTE OF THE JAR I placed a jar in Tennessee, 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. PETER QUINCE AT THE CLAVIER I Just as my fingers on these keys Music is feeling, then, not sound; Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, Of a green evening, clear and warm, The basses of their beings throb Of spent emotions. She felt, among the leaves, The dew Of old devotions. She walked upon the grass, The winds were like her maids Fetching her woven scarves, A breath upon her hand III Soon, with a noise like tambourines, Came her attendant Byzantines. They wondered why Susanna cried Against the elders by her side; And as they whispered, the refrain Was like a willow swept by rain. Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame Revealed Susanna and her shame. And then, the simpering Byzantines Fled. with a noise like tambourines. Sister and mother and diviner love, And of the sisterhood of the living dead Most near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom, And flame and summer and sweet fire, no thread Now, of the music summoned by the birth For so retentive of themselves are men The near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom, That apprehends the most which sees and names, O bough and bush and scented vine, in whom Yet not too like, yet not so like to be Too near, too clear, saving a little to endow Our feigning with the strange unlike, whence springs For this, musician, in your girdle fixed Bear other perfumes. On your pale head wear A band entwining, set with fatal stones. |