Solving for X
by Mark Jarman
Cached on July 1, 2009, from
http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/335/01Reading13Ways.pdf
(Horizontal lines indicate page breaks in the copy, not in the
original.)
Source: Mark Jarman, “Solving for X: The Poetry and Prose of
Wallace Stevens (Review of Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and
Prose, ed. by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. The Library of
America),” The Hudson Review, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Spring 1998): 250-
256.
I HEARD A YOUNG LITERARY CRITIC SAY RECENTLY that
Edgar Allan Poe was beyond criticism. I'm not sure if she meant that
Poe was not worth writing about anymore or if he was beyond reproach.
Perhaps, she meant both. And perhaps that is what it means to be
canonized, if being included in The Library of America series, as Poe
has been, means canonization. The Library of America has also added
Wallace Stevens to its pantheon.1 Does that mean Stevens is beyond
criticism? For example, is Randall Jarrell's poor opinion of Stevens'
late
work no longer relevant? There are good reasons for thinking of Stevens
as beyond criticism, even as for many contemporary critics of poetry, he
remains predominant, "man number one" among the "man-poets," as he
called them, of Modernism. Of course, I am aware that the problem with
thinking this way, as if the work of any major literary figure were of
interest only to literary critics, is limited. Presumably, now that
Stevens'
poetry, most of his prose, and some of his letters are available in a
single
volume, he will be more accessible to the general reading public, as he
deserves to be. It is clear from reading his collected poetry and prose
that among modern American poets his project, though it is hard to
describe, is the richest, most sustained, most highly developed, and
finally, most relevant to our time or to what his biographer Joan
Richardson has called "a century of disbelief." But because his project
is
hard to describe, the question remains
whether or not the bulk of his
work is of interest only to literary critics.
Most of the poems for which Stevens is famous come from his
first book, Harmonium, published in 1923 when he was
forty-four. It
reads as freshly and strangely and beautifully today as it must have
read
then. In Harmonium life on earth appears as fantastic as life
on another
planet. If Stevens had never written another poem, or published another
book, he would still be read as the author of "In the Carolinas,"
"Domination of Black," "The Snow Man," "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,"
"Nuances of a Theme by Williams," "The Comedian as the Letter C,"
"Valley Candle," "Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks," "A High-Toned
Old Christian [250] Woman," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream,"
"Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock," "Sunday Morning," "Anecdote of the
Jar," "Gubbinal," 'To the One of Fictive Music," "Peter Quince at the
Clavier," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and, though it was
added later, "Sea Surface Full of Clouds." I have listed only the poems
I
believe are best known and most often found in anthologies. For some of
these, in that single book, there are other gems of equal worth, and I
can
imagine another reader's list might include them. It was at the end of
his
negative review of Stevens' 1950 collection, The Auroras of Autumn,
that Randall Jarrell made his famous comment about a poet being great
if he has been struck by lightning a dozen times. The electrifying poet
of
Harmonium meets that quota.
Whatever it was and is that makes these poems so appealing, a
couple of considerations allow us to look at Stevens' first book with a
more retrospective awareness. First, the developing aesthetic project of
the subsequent books affects the way we read the longest poem in
Harmonium, "The Comedian as the Letter C," and some of the
others,
like "Sunday Morning," of course, but also "Palace of the Babies" and
"Architecture." Second, thanks to Stevens' own criticism and to his
biographer, we can identify the effects of what he was reading and what
he had read. The influence of at least two of Stevens' fellow poets in
The
Library of America series can be detected in Harmonium. The
gnomic
fables of Stephen Crane's poetry are echoed throughout, from the first
poem, "Earthy Anecdote," to the last, "To the Roaring Wind." (Stevens
attended Crane's funeral in New York in 1900, the year he turned
twenty-one, and admired and briefly tried to emulate Crane's career.)
The other poet who echoes through Stevens' work, both early and late, is
– you thought I was going to say Walt Whitman. In fact, Stevens had
little use for Whitman, except for a couple of marvelous images, most
notably in "Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery" ("In the far South
the sun of autumn is passing / Like Walt Whitman walking along a
ruddy shore"). The other American poet we actually hear in Stevens'
poetry is Edgar Allan Poe, whose sound effects and tintinnabulation
appear in poems throughout Stevens' career, polished to suavity, but
still
audible in "the turbulent tinges" that "undulate" in "The Bird with the
Coppery, Keen Claws," and in the late poem "Of Mere Being," in which
a bird's "fire-fangled feathers dangle down." It is not Poe's sound
alone
which seems to have influenced Stevens, but also his taste for the
exotic,
the imagined land where he had never been, the very sort of thing that
attracted Baudelaire and Mallarme, who were in turn favorites of
Stevens, so that it is possible the younger American imbibed the older
American as he was distilled in the French Symbolists.
The Library of America edition allows us to follow the
development of Stevens' poetry and his thought, especially his thought.
For after Harmonium, Stevens' ambition is to work out a very
large idea:
to find a substitute for the absence punched through heaven by Darwin
and Freud. Helen Vendler in her book on Stevens' long poems correctly
[251] relates this ambition to his constant aim to write a long poem.
Time and again, it seems that either Stevens has succeeded in writing a
long poem or he has fallen short. As with the memorable poems in
Harmonium, we can list the long poems that attempt to work out
his
great idea. Besides "The Comedian as the Letter C," they include "Owl's
Clover," "The Man with the Blue Guitar," "Extracts from Addresses to
the Academy of Fine Ideas," "Examination of the Hero in a Time of
War," "Chocorua to Its Neighbor," "Esthetique du Mal," "Description
Without Place," "Cre- dences of Summer," "Notes Toward A Supreme
Fiction," "The Auroras of Autumn," "An Ordinary Evening in New
Haven," and "Things of August." Many of the shorter poems that appear
with these seem to be corollary or adjunct versions of the longer
disquisitions.
Stevens' prose, especially in The Necessary Angel, illuminates
and confirms, sometimes even clarifies, what he seems to be talking
about in his long poems. In "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"
he informs us that "the soul no longer
exists" but that "art sets out to
express the human soul" and the poet's role "is to help people live
their
lives." The consolation the poet offers is imagination, of which art and
especially poetry are incarnations. As he says succinctly in his
collection
of aphorisms, Adagia, "After one has abandoned a belief in god,
poetry
is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption." In his 1949
essay "Imagination as Value," he comes up against the crux of his
thought and resolves it in the person of George Santayana, his friend
and
mentor at Harvard, but at that time living in retirement in a convent in
Rome.
... the function of the imagination is so varied that it is
not welldefined
as it is in arts and letters. In life one hesitates when one
speaks of the value of the imagination. Its value in arts and
letters is aesthetic. Most men's lives are thrust upon them. The
existence of aesthetic value in lives that are forced on those that
live them is an improbable sort of thing. There can be lives,
nevertheless, which exist by the deliberate choice of those that
live them. To use a single illustration: it 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 of familiar saints, whose presence
does so much to make any convent an appropriate refuge for a
generous and human philosopher.
Clearly Stevens believed that there need be no choice between
perfecting the life or perfecting the work, if one were allowed to treat
both as products of the imagination. A mark of his generation of
Modernists, perhaps because of their exposure to philosophers like
Santayana and William James, was that belief itself, belief in
something,
was imperative. [252]
Stevens' prose constantly sends us back to his poetry, so we can
be grateful for the generous selection of it in this volume. The short
piece, only three paragraphs long, with which he concludes his 1942
collection Parts of a World, is one of his most helpful essays,
and
especially in the following passage:
The poetry of the work of the imagination constantly
illustrates
the fundamental and endless struggle with fact. It goes on
everywhere, even in the periods that we call peace....
Nothing will ever appease this desire except a
consciousness of fact as everyone is at least satisfied to have it
be.
An echo of William James, another of Stevens' teachers at Harvard, can
be heard in the phrase "consciousness of fact," but "the work of the
imagination" is purely Stevens. That this work might be endless and
unappeasable and yet might ultimately satisfy everyone tells us
something about Stevens' poetry after Harmonium. It is one long
struggle with a non-fact: the existence of God. He must create a
theology from scratch, "as if," as he says in "The Rock," "nothingness
contained a métier." That theology or philosophy or aesthetic
(or all
three) must be based on the recognition that between the human eye and
reality, myths are constantly imposing their old forms. The imagination
has played a part in creating these myths, and it must be trained to
strip
them away, even while inevitably it creates new ones. As Professor
Eucalyptus says in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," "'The search /
For reality is as momentous as / The search for god.' " Yet the mind
reels
at these lines from "Credences of Summer":
The physical pine, the metaphysical pine.
Let's see the very thing and nothing else.
Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight.
Burn everything not part of it to ash.
Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky
Without evasion by a single metaphor.
Since language itself is metaphor, these imperatives are impossible to
satisfy. Robert Frost believed that the attempt of poetry to say matter
in
terms of spirit and spirit in terms of matter was a great attempt that
ultimately failed, because every metaphor
eventually broke down. Frost
seemed to be satisfied with that knowledge. Stevens is not, and that is
why his poetry after Harmonium remains important but hard to
read.
By hard to read, I do not mean only difficult, requiring the
hermeneutic intelligence of a critic, but I mean hard to keep reading.
Jarrell said bluntly that Stevens' philosophizing was "monotonous." My
own point is that reading Stevens after Harmonium, especially
his long
poems, [253] is an acquired taste. And yet, having said that, I can go
through the later work and find as many wonderful poems as there are in
the first book: "The Idea of Order at Key West," "The American
Sublime," "A Postcard from the Volcano," "The Men That Are Falling,"
"The Man on the Dump," "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts," "Loneliness
in Jersey City," "The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man," "Martial
Cadenza," "Of Modern Poetry," "The House Was Quiet and the World
Was Calm," "Large Red Man Reading," "An Old Man Asleep," "Final
Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour," "The Planet on the Table," and "Of
Mere Being." Others will have different lists, but I think most readers
would agree that after Harmonium Stevens never returned to the
wildness and mystery of, say, "Domination of Black" with its peacocks,
whose remembered but unstated cry is "Help!" There are no more
encounters with the likes of "Berserk" ("Oh, sharp he was / As the
sleepless!") and Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan ("Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am
the
personal"). Even the delectable shorter poems of his later work wear the
complexion of his larger endeavor. He always knows what he is after.
One way or another, as he tells us in "Mere Being," it is "The palm at
the end of the mind, / Beyond the last thought..."
That Stevens became enveloped in his philosophy, as surely as
Dante was in his cosmology, is a principal reason that we think of him
among what are called the High Modernists. Certainly, the poets we
place him among, Yeats, Frost, Eliot, and Pound, all recognized the
same problem and all had a plan or vision that tried to resolve it. The
way each of their careers ends may reflect the efficacy and validity of
their visions. Pound ends in incoherence and apology, Eliot in high
church Christianity, and Frost in self-congratulation. But Stevens
continues to extend the possibilities. There is nothing in the last
poems
that makes us sorry, as there is in Frost. We may feel that we have
heard
it before, but not as if we are reading self-parody. There is a
serenity to
Stevens' attempts to keep finding variables for the imagination, to keep
solving for X. He unfolds the endless pleasure of metaphor, of saying
"It
is" or "It is like," as if all experience could be found to have endless
resemblances ("The weather is like a waiter with a tray"; "The moon
follows the sun like a French / Translation of a Russian poet"; "The
whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of
its
fate"), and all the while he keeps the placid equanimity of a photograph
of Lake Geneva in the summertime. The serenity of late Stevens has an
excellence that equals the passion of late Yeats. And that serenity has
a
music as unique as we find in any of Stevens' contemporaries. We can
hear its cool gravity in the opening lines of "The Rock":
It is an illusion that we were ever alive,
Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves,
By our own motions in a freedom of air.
Regard the freedom of seventy years ago. [254]
It is no longer air. The houses still stand,
Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.
Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain.
The lives these lived in the mind are at an end.
They never were ...
A poet friend of mine recently quoted these lines to one of our
teachers,
himself one of the masters of the older generation, who responded, "Tell
me about it."
The publication of a volume in The Library of America series
stimulates a desire to grasp an entire career, to understand the whole
work once and for all, while at the same time recognizing that the
ultimate value of a literary creation, like Stevens' poetry, will never
and
should never be understood once and for all. Nevertheless, our responses
may differ. Poe may be beyond criticism, but the publication of Robert
Frost's work by The Library of America has signaled a reassessment of
that great but misunderstood poet. The publication of Stevens' collected
poetry and prose, made possible by support from the late James Merrill,
is further sign of Stevens' eminence at the end of the century, in no
small
part as the most pervasive influence on
contemporary American poetry.
Theodore Roethke was simply stating the facts forty years ago when he
imagined young poets singing, in "A Rouse for Stevens," "Wallace
Stevens – are we for him? / Brother, he's our father!" But he was also
being prophetic.
And yet a question remains about Wallace Stevens' own
parentage. Even though critics have amply supplied lines of descent,
especially from the English Romantics, and his biographer, Joan
Richardson, has speculated extensively on the influence of French and
German poetry on Stevens, as I read from Harmonium through his
uncollected poems and compare the imagination of the poetry with the
exposition of the prose, I hear the voice of one who may be more
predecessor than parent, another American poet whose project most
resembles Stevens' attempt to create a new faith in poetry. Gender
politics has obscured the lines of descent for now, but there is
definitely
a link, if not a lineage, between Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens.
Her epic for the age of disbelief – nearly 1800 poems and innumerable
letters – anticipates all the moderns who were Stevens' contemporaries,
and her conclusion is most like Stevens' own. Fifty years before the
publication of his first book, she wrote:
Those-dying then,
Knew where they went-
They went to God's Right Hand-
That Hand is amputated now
And God cannot be found- [255]
The abdication of Belief
Makes the Behavior small-
Better an ignis fatuus
Than no illume at all-
"Better an ignis fatuus / Than no illume at all":
these lines could have
been plucked right out of Harmonium. With them Dickinson not
only
anticipates Stevens' coinages ("illume"), but his sentiments. He
pays her
homage, perhaps unwittingly, with the following lines from a late poem,
"Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour."
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
At this remove, their visions do seem much the same, and hers seems
even more daring and radical because of when and how it occurred.
Recent critical theory sees only daughters for Emily, but Wallace has to
look like a son or at least a nephew. Incidentally, she has yet to be
included in The Library of America series. It must be about time. [256]