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A Wallace Stevens Reader's Guide

A Stevens Lexicon

Developed by David Lavery and the students
in the summer 2002 Wallace Stevens Seminar.

The Vulgate of Experience

By Shirley R. Conn

The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary gives two primary meanings for vulgate: common or colloquial speech, and as the standard accepted reading or version of any text. The phrase "vulgate of experience" occurs only once in the poetry of Wallace Stevens in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." The word vulgate occurs twice in "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction."

In "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," it is used in the meaning of "common or colloquial speech." Canto IX begins with these lines: "The poem goes from the poet's gibberish to / The gibberish of the vulgate and back. / Does it move to and fro or is it of both / At once?" Later in the same canto, this is said of the poet:

It is the gibberish of the vulgate that he seeks. He tries by a peculiar speech to speak The peculiar potency of the general, To compound the imagination's Latin with The lingua franca et jocundissima.

Sukenick states that this entire canto is questioning whether the poem fluctuates between the nonsense or "gibberish" of poetic language or the nonsense of common speech or whether it is both at once. Another line in the canto calls the poet "this hot, dependent orator, / The spokesman at our bluntest barriers." In one of Stevens' letters, he explains that "our bluntest barriers" means "our limitations" (435). Sukenick explains the canto in this manner:

He [the poet] articulates meaning for us, for the vulgate. He is the exponent of the vulgate by virtue of his peculiar form of speech, a speech that tries to reach meanings beyond speech itself ("only a little of the tongue"). He rather seeks the nonsense of the vulgate and tries to articulate it, to combine--as in the "imagination's Latin of the last line--the learned language of the imagination with the vulgate, which is both the common language ("lingua franca," a jargon once used among different Mediterranean nationalities; also "franca" as free) and the most pleasant one ("jocundissima"). (151)

More frequently, however, "vulgate" is used as it in the phrase "vulgate of experience" in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." The poem itself begins with the line containing this phrase: "The eye's plain version is a thing apart, / The vulgate of experience." Here the phrase refers to what the eye sees or perceives, in other words, perception, without the imagination acting upon it or the mind thinking about it. It is reality stripped of its fictions and illusions. The data received through the senses is the usual, common version of experience. This idea, in fact, occurs numerous times in this poem and in many of Stevens' poems.

It is important to point out that "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" presents reality as existing somewhere between the "vulgate of experience" and the mind as they fuse with one another; sometimes one is dominant, sometimes the other. The older Stevens, in particular, seems to long for the bareness of reality, stripped of its fictions. However, sometimes it is too stark. In the fourth canto of "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," he says that "the plainness of plain things is savagery, / As the last plainness of a man who has fought / Against illusion."

Stevens distinguishes between the object itself, the object simply perceived by the senses, and the object acted upon by the imagination or the rational mind. In Canto V, he speaks of "Reality as a thing seen by the mind, / Not that which is but that which is apprehended." This reality, he says paradoxically, is "Everything as unreal as real can be, / In the inexquisite eye," the eye which does not clothe objects with the fictive covering of the imagination. Stevens then ponders how the self, "the chrysalis of all men," became divided. He asserts that "one part / Held fast tenaciously in common earth," "common earth" being the vulgate.

In Canto VI, this reality is "naked Alpha," not the "hierphant Omega, / Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals." The vulgate is "the infant A standing on its infant legs." In Canto IX, Stevens longs for the "poem of pure reality"

Untouched By trope or deviation, straight to the word, Straight to the transfixing object, to the object At the exactest point at which it is itself, Tranfixing by being purely what it is, A view of New Haven, say, through the certain eye, The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight Of simple seeing, without reflection. We seek nothing beyond reality.

In Canto XIV, Professor Eucalyptus seeks god in New Haven "with an eye that does not see beyond the object." Canto XXI contrasts the romantic isle of Cythere with one which is "close to the senses." It is "the clear."

"Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," too, has examples of the concept of the "vulgate of experience." In the first canto of "It Must Be Abstract," we are told that "you must become an ignorant man again / And see the sun again with an ignorant eye / And see it clearly in the idea of it." In the six th canto, we are told that "it must be visible or invisible, / Invisible or visible or both: / A seeing and an unseeing in the eye." In Canto VIII, Nanzia Nunzio represents a stripped-down reality, as she literally strips herself of "bright gold," of her "stone'studded belt," and her necklace, saying to Ozymandias to clothe her in the "final filament," for "a fictive covering / Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind." In the first canto of "It Must Give Pleasure," Stevens says that "to feel the heart / That is the common, the bravest fundament, / This is a facile exercise." However, he then states the difficulty of seeing without fictions or rational thought:

But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,

On the image of what we see, to catch from that Irrational moment its unreasoning As when the sun comes rising, when the sea

Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall Of heaven-haven.

After relating the story of the Canon Aspirin who imposes order on everything he sees, we are told this is not the way to get to reality: 

But to impose is not To discover. To discover an as of A season, to discover summer and know it, 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.

What Stevens wants is "to find the real, / To be stripped of every fiction except one, / The fiction of an absolute."

In the poem "The Rock," the rock is the image of reality seen without the imagination. When the poet composes a poem, he covers the "rock with leaves." "The fiction of the leaves is the icon of the poem." "The poem makes meanings of the rock, /Of such mixed motion and such imagery / That its barrenness becomes a thousand things /And so exists no more. Stevens then proceeds to define the rock as "the gray particular of man's life"; it is "the stern particular of the air, / The mirror of the planets, one by one, / But through man's eye, their silent rhapsodist." Finally, "The rock is the habitation of the whole, / Its strength and measure, that which is near, point A / In a perspective that begins again at Point B."

Another poem in which we see the concept of the "vulgate of reality" is "Questions and Remarks": the grandson "sees it as it is," not "with so much rhetoric." "It is the question of what he is capable, / It is the extreme, the expert aetat. 2." The grandson, then, simply perceives, without surrounding what he sees with fictions or "rhetoric."

Certainly in "The Snow Man," to see "the frost and the boughs / of the pine-trees crusted with snow," the "junipers shagged with ice, / The spruces rough in the distant of the January sun," in other words, to "have a mind of winter," this is to be at ground zero, back to the "vulgate of experience." To "have a mind of winter" is to be "nothing himself," to be capable of beholding the "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

In "The Man on the Dump," Stevens notes "how many men have copied dew for buttons, how many women have covered themselves / With dew, dew dresses," and he comments upon how "one grows to hate these thing except on the dump." The dump is back to bare reality, cleansed of our projections. It is the place where "everything is shed." It is "what one wants to get near"; it is "the the."

In "Credences of Summer," Stevens says that the "rock cannot be broken. It is the truth." When the rock is devoid of leaves, says Stevens in "The Plain Sense of Things," "we return to a plain sense of things," the "plain sense of it, without reflections." In "Notes on Moonlight," moonlight, "like a plain poet revolving in his mind / The sameness of his various universe, / Shines on the ' mere objectiveness of things." What the moon evokes, what its "property" is, is " to disclose the essential presence." What Stevens finally wants is "not ideas about the thing but the thing itself."

In Stevens' poetry, then, we see many references to the "vulgate of experience"; it is the rock, the "inexquisite eye," "the plain sense of things"; it is "the the." It is reality stripped bare, the world as sense data only.

Works Consulted

Brown, Lesley, ed. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on  Historical Principles. New York: Oxford U P, 1993.

LaGuardia, David. Advance on Chaos: The Sanctifying Imagination  of Wallace Stevens. Hanover: Brown U P, 1983.

Rieke, Alison. "Stevens in Corsica, Lear in New Haven. New England Quarterly Mar. 1990: 35-59. Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage, 1982.

Sukenick, Ronald. Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure. New York: New York U P, 1967.

Vendler, Helen Hennessy. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1969.

[Shirley R. Conn]