by William Logan

from The New Criterion, October 2009
 

Wallace Stevens was not quite a teenager when Whitman died. Divided by some sixty years and the Civil War, these famous stay-at-homes were both elbowing representatives of a character peculiarly American. It was cunning for Whitman to pretend to be an American rough, though his rough edges were largely of his own making, and inspired of Stevens to conceal his poetic imagination beneath the wool suit of an expert in surety bonds. One life might be laid upon the affinities of the other: they shared the nonconforming education (Stevens a Harvard man, but a non-degree student); the late access to mature poetry (Leaves of Grass published at 36, Harmonium at 43); the belated recognition and almost bardic status; the vagueness about the private life (we are as mystified by the sexuality of the one as the other). These are the types and conditions of self-invention, the restlessness of an American identity more familiar as lighting out for the territories, both men staying put in a country founded on the idea of moving on.

The poet has interior landscapes in which to disappear and conformities without that conceal a radical soul within—Stevens was a lawyer, so was his father, so were his two brothers. What is Jaggers or Tulkinghorn but a man paid to keep secrets? (One might say of Stevens that the secret he kept at last from himself was the secret of himself.) Finally, there is the poetry, its achievement an imposed wholeness, Whitman endlessly tinkering with and augmenting Leaves, Stevens wanting to lodge his life’s work under the title The Whole of Harmonium: The Grand Poem.

Just as a forged oil or period drama eventually betrays the date of its creation (as if there were a terrible secret it could not contain), poems eventually reveal the terms of their time—we become old enough to read them in their spectral hour, and they become old enough to let us. Here too, Whitman and Stevens form a nexus more than an estrangement: their love of exotic places and foreign words; the multitudes they contained but resisted; their imaginative excess or overplus. One could never confuse two poetries so divorced by influence or design, the poems formed in different periods with different antagonisms. (Yet aren’t these the most philosophically addled of American poets?) The shadows of biography give access to something less than architecture but more than accident—the progress of a country that encourages certain types of character, or at least does not eliminate them. At Whitman’s birth, the territory west of the Mississippi lay vastly unexplored; until the Mexican War the far west and southwest were not yet America. The America of twenty-one states added only seventeen more before the birth of Stevens—when young, he knew a country still barely formed.

We include Stevens in that catchall group the moderns, those poets who changed American verse into something still recognizable a century later. The moderns were rudely different from one another, yet they gave American poetry an immense armory of practice not exhausted yet. Their heirs now have heirs (and those heirs, heirs); their legacy of redskins and palefaces, of the raw and the cooked, invented the poetry we call our own—and much that the English and Irish call their own as well. If their impulses were variant, their poetry in part incompatible, and their relations at times hostile, Frost, Stevens, Williams, Pound, Moore, and Eliot largely set the terms for the poetry written afterward.

The compelling thing about the moderns is that a reader doesn’t have to choose among them—each is a monument to choices made and values discovered. To adore one is not to adore all; but one can adore all, or almost all (my own blindness extends to Williams), without reservation or rank. Part of the invention of self proved to be breaking the contract with the settled assumptions of period verse. It’s easy to underestimate this moment in American letters, when certain boundaries and stock notions about poetry were, in geological terms, erased almost overnight. Between 1909 (Personae) and 1923 (Harmonium), there was a tectonic shift in what a poem had to do to be called a poem.

Harmonium is one of the most violently original, uncategorizable books ever published by an American poet. Critics said Stevens’s “diction, in strangeness of effect, lags but little after Miss Sitwell”; that “you are struck by a sort of aridity”; that one poem “defies completely all rational explanations… . What strange subterfugitive symphonies of infinitesimal tomtoms titillate the listener’s ears.” (Reactions to Leaves of Grass had been even more bewildered). Even eighty-six years later, a reader finds himself lost in the land of the Oklahoma firecat and the Palaz of Hoon, falling among characters like Don Joost and Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan, having wandered into a bizarre world more familiar in Lear’s limericks or Carroll’s nonsense verse. There are poems that don’t start in the right place and poems that stop in the wrong one. Some are cast in plodding end-stopped blank verse, some have a smattering of rhyme, and some indulge in the wild shouts and alarums of “Ohoyaho,/ Ohoo,” “tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,” and “Tum-ti-tum,/ Ti-tum-tum-tum!” In short, the poems are so strange, so unlikely, sometimes they don’t seem poems at all.

One of Stevens’s demonic gifts is to be able to write beautifully, almost at will:

You know how Utamaro’s beauties sought
The end of love in their all-speaking braids.
You know the mountainous coiffures of Bath.
Alas! Have all the barbers lived in vain
That not one curl in nature has survived?
Why, without pity on these studious ghosts,
Do you come dripping in your hair from sleep?

I might complain about the talking hair, which lies barely within the license of metaphor (in part because the stillness of ukiyo-e prints and the almost unreadable whitened faces make every gesture in Utamaro speak—whether the flash of a kimono’s design or the melodrama of a woman’s most animalistic feature, her head of hair), but the final image is redolent of the terror and possession of dreams. Yet later in the same poem, “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” (surely the smuggest title in modernist verse and the most madcap), Stevens writes:

The fops of fancy in their poems leave
Memorabilia of the mystic spouts,
Spontaneously watering their gritty soils.
I am a yeoman, as such fellows go.
I know no magic trees, no balmy boughs,
No silver-ruddy, gold-vermilion fruits.

Everything direct and suggestive in the first passage seems padded with horsehair stuffing here, translated into a musty language out of Burton’s Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night or FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Part of Stevens’s imagination emerged from such baggy, perfumed Victorian translations, though his ornamental phrases out-Burton Burton and out-FitzGerald FitzGerald. Stevens’s imagination is more distorted than clarified by his eastern pillow-book fancies (perhaps insurance lawyers were the equivalent of sultans—I suspect their underlings thought so). Whenever he indulges in his visions of Persians or Aztecs or whatever they are, his imagination grows reckless and incontinent.

Disaffected with the modern, especially the modern city, Stevens wrote his fiancée in 1908, “That elevated train coming home with its negroes and cheap people! Dearest, keep me from seeing all that. It is nonsense but it wrecks me.” Real life was the nonsense—that’s the ugly end of Stevens’s aestheticism, the denial of the humdrum, mundane world outside (not just blacks as a faceless class, but “cheap people”). Stevens never felt the vivifying humanity of subway passengers apparent in the peephole photographs of Walker Evans. Stevens’s unpleasant side has often been ignored. He was more generous ten years later, when he wrote during the draft that followed America’s entry into the Great War:

The negroes on the platform ran up and down shaking hands with those in the cars. The few white people who happened to be near took an indulgent attitude. They regard negroes as absurdities. They have no sympathy with them. I tried to take that point of view: to laugh at these absurd animals, in order to understand how it was convenable that one should feel. But the truth is that I feel thrilling emotion at these draft movements… . It makes no difference whether the men are black or white.

This is responsive observation coiled around casual racism (the black draftees are perhaps still absurd animals to him—his benevolent feelings seem provoked more by the draft); such passages measure how narrowly Stevens avoided a suffocating misanthropy. He wasn’t beyond writing from Cuba a few years after that he had gone “up to a nigger policeman to get my bearings and found that the poor thing could not even understand me.” The poor thing.

The giddiness of early Stevens, the tragicomedy that attends even his more serious verse, never entirely left him, but like most comic routines it could not be mechanically repeated without becoming tiresome or desperate. (As one critic wrote of Harmonium, Stevens “must … take in more of human experience, or give up writing altogether.”) The poems are so peculiar, critics were a while catching up. To love Stevens, you have to love his deformities and even his monstrosities, as you do the wretched, self-conscious lines in Whitman. (A poet’s bad lines are sometimes those he feels he has to write in order to call himself a poet—and occasionally just the lunatic edge of an imagination that under similar anxieties produces a masterpiece). The poems are diminished and even ruined by such oddities, but without the arterial energies they solicit and unleash, the better poems might be nothing. The license of exaggeration and exorbitance is the guilty evidence of the pressure of imagination elsewhere.

It’s hard at first to know how to take lines like “When this yokel comes maundering,/ Whetting his hacker”—the pleasure for the poet seems to lie largely in the jointed grotesqueries of the language. The words parse, but are excess to the lines’ reason. (The preposterousness of such lines has licensed a lot of freakish language since.) So much of even very good Stevens is cast in this language—half fairy tale, half kindergarten gibberish—the reader must embrace the vice as a virtue and simply admire the emperor’s clothes. Much ink has been spilled justifying stanzas like

The lacquered loges huddled there
Mumbled zay-zay and a-zay, a-zay.
The moonlight
Fubbed the girandoles.

The poem is titled “The Ordinary Women” —those same cheap people Stevens loathed, though he tries to see them transformed. R. P. Blackmur, in his swamp-clearing essay “Examples of Wallace Stevens,” defends the poet against charges of preciosity:

The loges huddled probably because it was dark or because they didn’t like the ordinary women, and mumbled perhaps because of the moonlight, perhaps because of the catarrhs, or even to keep key to the guitars. Moonlight, for Mr. Stevens, is mental, fictive … ; naturally it fubbed the girandoles (which is equivalent to cheated the chandeliers, was stronger than the artificial light, if any)… . I am at a loss, and quite happy there, to know anything literally about this poem. Internally, inside its own words, I know it quite well by simple perusal. The charm of the rhymes is enough to carry it over any stile. The strange phrase, “Fubbed the girandoles,” has another charm, like that of the rhyme, and as inexplicable: the approach of language, through the magic of elegance, to nonsense.

So it’s all nonsense and elegance, then! Elegance is the vacant form of eloquence.

This argument is unsatisfying in a number of ways. The poem isn’t nearly so mysterious. Loges has a specific meaning—originally referring to the theater boxes beside the stage, later it indicated the lower rows of a cinema balcony (the OED has so far ignored this meaning). Loge tickets could be more expensive than those in the orchestra, sometimes having plusher seats; and it is not likely to the loges, with their spacious and dramatic view of the screen, that these ordinary women have repaired. We know they have no money to spare (“Then from their poverty they rose”), so an evening at the cinema (“They crowded/ The nocturnal halls”), with its “lacquered loges” and gilt appointments, would be an escape from care (“They flung monotony behind”). I’m going to assume that these women are watching some eight-reeler rather than a play, because the 1910s and 1920s were the great age of the silent screen—the everyday refuge of the working poor. The film may be some Douglas Fairbanks feature set in a palace, perhaps The Three Musketeers (1921). The Dumas classic certainly has “civil fans” and coiffures in abundance, and there is the famous subplot involving the theft of the queen’s diamond brooch (“How explicit the coiffures became,/ The diamond point, the sapphire point,/ The sequins/ Of the civil fans!”).

Of course, it doesn’t have to be any particular film—Hollywood noted very early the romantic effect of castles and palaces. And the “palace” (“They flitted/ Through the palace walls”) may be the picture house itself—Palace was a common theater name. The film would not necessarily have been silent, of course; big-city picture palaces employed ensembles or even orchestras in accompaniment (the talkies threw thousands of musicians out of work). After The Birth of a Nation (1915), major releases were provided with full scores. The classical guitar is not a standard instrument for orchestra, but could be called in as a score demanded. Even so, the “guitars” to whose music these women “flitted” might have been imaginary, heard with the inner ear—a fantasy that begins in the cinema and ends in reverie.

To “fub” is to cheat, a variant of “fob” (Shakespeare has “fub’d off” in 2 Henry IV). A “girandole,” according to the OED, is a “branched support for candles or other lights, either in the form of a candlestick … or more commonly as a bracket projecting from a wall.” One might see the former in a palace, or the latter in the lobby of a cinema or on the walls of the auditorium itself. The poem manages to mingle the world in the screen with the architecture of the cinema, but that’s surely the point—the viewer is most easily translated from the commonplaces of one world when there are points of contact with the other. (In Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924), the hero steps into the world of the screen, so the illusion is an old one.) If the moonlight “fubbed the girandoles,” the romantic moon—arc light for centuries of lovers—fools or deceives the house lights in the cinema. (This must be the moon in the film, not the one floating outside.) Presumably it is for just such escapist make-believe that the ordinary women pay their dime—the artificial moonlight seems more real than what casts shadows on their way back to their ordinary lives.

The scene these women watch and then enter (having left behind their coughing, their “dry catarrhs”) is presumably the “vapid haze of the window-bays” on which such cinematic moonglow falls—only a lighting effect, of course. The counterfeit moonlight deceives the paltry light of their world for an hour or two. (The light that projects through the nitrate film stock to cast shadows on the silver screen—the hazy conic beam caught by the smoke floating in cinemas of the day—would be a kind of moonbeam, too.) This cinematic reading of the poem, I discovered belatedly, was advanced as long ago as 1959 in a lecture by Clark Griffith, according to William Burney, who develops a somewhat off-center variant in his book Wallace Stevens. Oddly, critics still treat the poem, in Harriet Monroe’s words, as if its “play of whimsicalities … seem a mere banter of word-bubbles.”

The astonishing thing is that Blackmur, as close to a genius as American criticism ever produced (excepting only Poe), gave up on meaning so easily, or was just as enchanted by what he took to be nonsense as the women by the nonsense on the screen (even critics want the transports of fiction). It’s not even clear if he understood what Stevens meant by loges. If they were “huddled,” the seats might have been tightly compacted, but loge seats were usually spacious. Blackmur turned this into a bizarre fantasy where the loges dislike the ordinary women and mumble about them—but the loges are more likely a metonym, the more refined cinema-goers muttering at the screen in the same romantic tremor as the ordinary women. The mumbling in the loges, “zay-zay and a-zay, a-zay,” is neatly picked up a few stanzas later, when the guitarists “rumbled a-day and a-day, a-day.” The viewers sound enraptured, the guitarists merely morose, as if singing an antique chorus (“Alack a day!” or “A-well a day!” may be the phrase referred to).

After the mumbling in the loges, the force of the following stanza (“And the cold dresses that they wore”) suggests that the poor women have been transported to the “haze of the window-bays” on the silver screen. The “cold dresses” could be either the thin cotton dresses such ordinary women ordinarily wear or the sheer gowns of the women on the screen, with whom the poor women identify. At the end of the poem, the movement is reversed, and the women abandon the guitars, and “to catarrhs/ They flitted/ Through the palace walls.” They return to their petty illnesses and daily complaints, leaving the Palace, or whatever palace the Palace projected.

I am at a loss, and quite happy there, to know anything literally about this poem. For Blackmur, the poetry lies in the ignorance, in the near approach to nonsense. (I suppose many readers still feel that way.) It’s difficult to know what Stevens would have thought of this, but I suspect he was as mystified by his admirers as they were sometimes mystified by him. No man writes phrases like “fubbed the girandoles” who doesn’t want to be taken as a bit of a dandy, an aesthete in yellow kid-gloves—but, unless he’s also a kook, he has something precise in mind. I’d quarrel with Blackmur that the words Stevens used in Harmonium (“diaphanes,” “pannicles,” “carked,” “ructive,” “cantilene,” “buffo,” “princox,” “funest”) were always the most exact or exacting available, but, even if so, words have an effect beyond their meaning.

After rattling off a score of such arcane terms, Blackmur claims that “not a word listed … is used preciously; not one was chosen as an elegant substitute for a plain term; each, in its context, was a word definitely meant.” (He doesn’t mention bizarre phrases like “Paphian caricatures,” “aspic nipples,” “scullion of fate,” “unburgherly apocalypse,” “musician of pears, principium/ And lex,” “nincompated pedagogue,” “kremlin of kermess,” and much else.) A word may be exact without being useful or expedient. Blackmur’s case is that the poet’s language was not precious, because used precisely—yet the language of Sir Thomas Browne was precise. If “diaphanes,” “pannicles,” and “cantilene” aren’t precious, saved in their precision to be condemned by their perfume, no word can be. The difficulty is that Stevens thought the poem better if grown from such mannered phrases, or translated into them. Even were the words accurate, they lose more then they gain by their affectation. This is the problem Stevens suffered from the start—reaching after one good, he commits two bads.

Much of Stevens is tedious, refractory, pompous, or ponderous; even his masterpieces are full of bombast and puffery. As he got older, he fell into blank-verse philosophizing no less like boilerplate than the reams of legal documents that presumably issued from his office. He’s a poet whose words you want to get behind: the language is as much an obstacle as a pleasure. But, when you parse those phrases, when you go to the Palaz of Hoon and come back again, you’re often a little disappointed. The philosophy of his poems, the grand ones as well as the pleasingly trivial, are those of a freshman class in ontology, epistemology, or aesthetics. Stevens had a high opinion of his philosophical gifts—he was prickly and childish when a late lecture was rejected by the Review of Metaphysics. Eliot, who was a trained philosopher and possessed the subtlest mind among the moderns—perhaps the subtlest mind in all American poetry, if you exclude Melville—knew enough to leave the philosophy out, or to bury it deeply.

The best poems in Stevens don’t require the philosophy (if there’s an exception, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” proves that philosophy is rarely more honored in the observance than in the breach), and the worst are deformed by it. The long poems, those most drawn to Stevens’s metaphysical itch, those that feel it necessary to justify their length in terms of abstractions rendered and sustained (but rarely blooded), have made critics the most diagnostic. The critical response to Stevens has itself so often been abstract, so full of critic’s legalese, it has made him more a great cloud of being than a man who at times played with words.

I’m not a ready admirer of Stevens’s long poems, which permit too large a canvas for his vices, though I would except “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,” “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” and “Esthétique du Mal”—I hate myself for not loving a monolith like “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” which has been crushed by the burden of its ideas. The long poems are often drowsy, tropical, and hard to stay awake through (like vast stretches of Tennyson, in their way)—you have to like warmed-over Santanyana to tolerate them. They often seem the last gasp of Romantic tenor rather than the start of something new. Late Stevens, indeed, is sometimes composed as if early Stevens never existed: the girandoles have almost vanished, replaced by the metaphysical wallpaper. The long poems have been overrated, perhaps because they are so often about art. Critics love poems about poetry, and love even better poems about poetics, as if they took more wisdom to write.

Yet even in a poem as tedious as “Sunday Morning,” Stevens rises to magnificence:

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Passages like this, and there are scores of them scattered through the work, justify the acres of dull philosophizing lacking the odor of a necessary world.

Stevens continues to cast a spell over readers, like that other architect of high Romantic nonsense, Hart Crane. The critics who soon talked evasively of “pure poetry” (as Stevens did himself, though nothing is more impure than his hobbledehoy language) were trying desperately to compare Stevens to what had been, which is irresistible and misleading. You need to read Mallarmé to understand him, perhaps, but Mallarmé doesn’t take you very far. For such a poet, the only accurate criticism must be comparison to what is yet to come. Stevens is a poet not predictable from the poetry he borrowed from and was inspired by—he became something that could not yet be named, and at last became his heirs.

Like Swinburne, like Hart Crane, like Ashbery, Stevens is reduced by explanation. The incense of the words themselves can be so heady that readers swoon (you can see why, loving the effect, Blackmur was wary of the meaning). Such poets often seem translations of themselves—their poems might just as well be fanciful versions from Hungarian or Langue d’oc. If I prefer poems more complicated the more their effects are exposed (consider Eliot, or Lowell, or Hill—and think of Shakespeare), that is a preference armed as a prejudice. Stevens could write so well without recourse to his dress-up costumes and Masonic vestments (at times he seems decked out in the leavings of a theatrical trunk), it’s a pity that you have to wade through a great bog of minor work to get at poems that sharpen the responses of the imagination.

John N. Serio, the editor of Stevens’s Selected Poems, is one of those fond readers of Stevens who are a little too fond (1). The poet did not publish his Collected Poems until the last months of his life. He long refused to draw a line under his career—and fortunately he abandoned the idea of calling the thing The Whole of Harmonium. What the editor has given us is perhaps The Half of Harmonium, but it is well judged, defined without being definitive. Few poems familiar to readers have been excluded (I’m tempted to say none at all), and, where there is an omission, it’s filled by something almost as interesting. With Stevens, you could take a lucky dip and get a selection that would spoil a lesser poet.

The table of contents might have identified, as did the fine Library of America Collected Poems, the poems added to Harmonium in 1931, and the editor might have noted the dates of the poems drawn from Opus Posthumous. It is delightful, however, to see the poems surrounded by so much space (the Library of America edition is compactly printed, perfectly legible, but stuffed to the gills). Harmonium was a small, squat book, easy to hold in the palm—it’s important to return a poet to the eye, when we cannot return him to the ear.

In his rambling introduction, the editor is given to that mode of criticism halfway between a fan’s notes and a publisher’s blurb. He claims that Stevens “has the uncanny talent to evoke pure being,” but when Stevens falls into metaphysical guff, it’s almost always inimical to his gifts, just the place where he’s most given to fustian and empty emotion. The editor writes as if Stevens were an irrational mystic:

His poems often had sources beyond the rational and sometimes surpassed even his own cognitive understanding… . Stevens’s poetic gift to express humanity through his art, although it might have derived from his personal response to the world, his idiosyncratic sensibility, is never mere self-expression… . Like all genuine art, it is universal.

I wonder whether the poet or the editor has taken leave of his senses. Mathematics may be universal. Only when poetry fails to be universal does it become poetry.

The magnificence of Stevens comes at a cost, the same cost we pay for Whitman: logorrhea of an uncharming and embarrassing sort, absurd notions, passages too private with their own pleasure, tone-deafness, lofty ambitions insufficiently grounded, and gouts of gimcrack philosophy. The longer the poems, the more likely they were disfigured—even defeated—by these defects. Yet Stevens is our major poet of emotional extinction. There’s so little human warmth in his poems (occasionally, rarely, in the comic glimmer), you couldn’t toast a marshmallow with it, but the poetry seems the product of, and most terribly reveals, a damaged soul.

The moderns as a group appear, at this distance, far more crippled than the confessional poets who were their distant heirs and rivals. Eliot suffered nervous collapse and desperate religiosity; Moore a withdrawn adulthood, like an adolescence from whose chrysalis she never emerged; Williams the bouts of goatish womanizing; Frost his egotistic and monstrous cruelties; and Stevens a frozen hauteur and morose unhappiness. Pound is the only one who emerges as a relatively complete man, full of broad loves and generosities, only to degenerate into idées fixes, fascist politics, fetid anti-Semitism, and quite possibly, in late middle-age, progressive dementia.

Unlike the Romantics, the American moderns lived to be old, not one dying before his seventy-fifth birthday, Pound and Frost almost reaching ninety. They survived long enough for time already to have winnowed taste (when we think of the might-have-beens, of Aiken and H. D., our grandfathers had already dismissed them, however much critics have tried to drag them back). After this long century, their classical notions—of the poet’s impersonality, of the high ambitions of art, of the sculptural shape of the poem—seem eaten up with romance, even the rot of romance, but what matters is less the way in which their modernity was tainted with a past than in how they reformed a poetry that, in 1909, still shared the timidity of English verse.

I wish that Stevens had developed the caustic humor his misanthropy permitted him, instead of the moonstruck fancies to which it drove him. Among the shorter verses added to the second edition of Harmonium are “Boston with a Note-book”:

Lean encyclopaedists, inscribe an Iliad.
There’s a weltanschauung of the penny pad.

and “Soupe Sans Perles”:

I crossed in ’38 in the Western Head.
It depends which way you crossed, the tea-belle said.

Stevens’s affection for such ironies must have been limited. The editor misses these; but they have a tone—an antagonism to convention—brutal and unexpected. They come with a small electric shock. Unfortunately, they’re buried with verses that exhibit Stevens in all his vice, like “A perfect fruit in perfect atmosphere./ Nature as Pinakothek. Whist! Chanticleer… .”

Stevens requires the condition of taste merely to begin, because he’s not well served by his weaknesses, or by the time-serving poetry to which weakness gave way. There are wonderful poems that almost everyone likes, including “The Snow Man,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters,” but there are poems nearly as lovely almost no one mentions: “From the Misery of Don Joost,” “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,” “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz,” “Re-statement of Romance,” “Anglais Mort à Florence,” “Yellow Afternoon,” “Holiday in Reality,” “Burghers of Petty Death,” “This Solitude of Cataracts,” and “Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight.” I would cheerfully trade “The Comedian as the Letter C,” “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” “The Auroras of Autumn,” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” for such poems, but Stevens is so capacious a poet, he has room for my obtuseness.

We don’t usually think of Stevens in terms of the opportunities missed—he remains one of our great poets despite his sins (not because of them), and a model of imaginative industry. Three-quarters of his poetry appeared after the age of fifty, and almost two-thirds after the age of sixty. Still, if he had held a job less demanding, or one that gratified him in different ways, or that didn’t require such rococo artifice and moony fantasies (as, all too soon, his marriage did as well), we might have had a poetry with more social observation and asperity. Or perhaps no poetry at all.

Note
1. Wallace Stevens, Selected Poems, edited by John N. Serio (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).

About the Author
William Logan's most recent book of poetry, Strange Flesh (Penguin), was published last year.

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