by James Longenbach

from The Antioch Review, Winter 2009

"The pressure of the contemporaneous from the time of the beginning of the World War to the present time has been constant and extreme. No one can have lived apart in a happy oblivion." Wallace Stevens made this remark in 1936, in the midst of the Depression, but its insight feels relevant today. Who can have lived apart in happy oblivion at any moment in the last seventy years? Stevens felt no respite from social pressures during the supposedly carefree twenties that followed the First World War, and what Robert Lowell would later call, with exquisite weariness, the unstoppable cycle of "small war on the heels of small war" has continued to this day. How does a poet legitimately respond to a social climate determined by such events?

"The war, people said, had revived their interest in poetry," said Virginia Woolf after the First World War. This phenomenon has repeated itself. Following September 11 and, subsequently, following the most recent invasion of Iraq, people who weren't ordinarily interested in poetry suddenly read poems. Poets who didn't ordinarily pay attention to public events suddenly wrote poems responding to them. And while it's easy to welcome anything that increases the audience of an ancient art, that welcome may disguise perennially intractable questions. What is a desire to read poetry in a time of social crisis really a desire for? Should a poet feel that by writing a poem he has truly fulfilled a social responsibility? Should a reader feel that a poem responding to calamitous events is a better poem than a poem about shop windows?

Consider the familiar opening lines of W. B. Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree":

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

These lines, as the poet Louis MacNeice subsequently reminded us, were "inspired by the sight of a London shop window where a little ball was dancing on a jet of water. A poet like W. H. Auden, MacNeice continued, "would most probably have included the little ball in the first verse of the poem, which would not necessarily have been either better or worse for it but which would have become a different poem."

MacNeice's point is that Yeats's poem is no better or worse for having elided the terms of its occasion; speaking as Auden's confederate, he didn't want automatically to prefer poems that refer openly to gas works and wars. Still, it's one thing to notice that a poem might have contained a London shop window but does not. What if the occasion of the poem is a soldier lying dead in his blood? What if the poem does not record that occasion but instead, like Yeats's poem, prefers to elaborate the feelings provoked by that occasion? Would that poem be, as MacNeice said, neither better nor worse but merely different from a poem that confronts us with the bodily cost of war?

Consider an early poem by Wallace Stevens, a poem called "The Death of a Soldier":

Life contracts and death is expected,
As in a season of autumn.
The soldier falls.

He does not become a three-days personage,
Imposing his separation,
Calling for pomp.

Death is absolute and without memorial,
As in a season of autumn,
When the wind stops,

When the wind stops and, over the heavens,
The clouds go, nevertheless,
In their direction.

Evident here are the preoccupations that distinguish the poems of Harmonium, Stevens's first book—a book whose power does not depend on our feeling the engagement of its poems with the world that provoked them; a book, to put it more coarsely, strategically unlike Eliot's Waste Land or Pound's Draft of XVI Cantos, which were published around the same time. In contrast to such worldliness, we find in "The Death of a Soldier" a more generalized philosophical interest in the relationship of human life and natural processes, and, as in the better-known "Snow Man," Stevens is stern in his rejection of narratives of religious or natural consolation: the soldier is not a figure for the risen Christ (no "three-days personage") and neither do the cycles of the natural world stop to record his death; the clouds go nevertheless in their direction, which can't be specified, because it's theirs, not ours.

The soldier feels simultaneously worldly and otherworldly, and so does the poem's diction—as if the poem's events were taking place around the corner and beyond the horizon. English is one of the few Indo-European languages with different words for "sky" and "heaven" (in Italian, for instance, "cielo" is the one word that refers to both the physical and the spiritual location). By saying that "over the heavens, / The clouds go, nevertheless, / In their direction," Stevens gives a very different impression than he would by saying "over the skies, / The clouds go, nevertheless, / In their direction." He wants us to feel that this poem is spoken simultaneously in the space of shop windows and in the space of disembodied thought and feeling.

Recall now the sentences with which I began: "The pressure of the contemporaneous from the time of the beginning of the World War to the present time has been constant and extreme. No one can have lived apart in a happy oblivion." In what way do Stevens's poems register this categorical wisdom? Because of its diction, "The Death of a Soldier" slips easily into the texture of Harmonium, but the poem began its life as a part of a sequence of poems called "Lettres d'un Soldat," a sequence inspired by the letters of Eugene Lemercier, a French soldier who was killed in the First World War. Originally, the poem was preceded by an epigraph culled from these letters ("The death of a soldier is close to natural things"), and the poem exposes the sentimentality of this remark, a sentimentality that may disguise the real horror of useless death by attempting too quickly to make it meaningful.

"The Death of a Soldier" is the eleventh poem in "Lettres d'un Soldat." In a preliminary version of the twelfth poem, Stevens turns similarly against the epigraph. Stevens's epigraphs were originally in French, but I provide English versions of them here.

I forgot to tell you that the other evening, during the storm, I saw the cranes returning. A lull allowed me to hear their cry.

The cranes return. The soldier hears their cry.
No: not as if the jades of willow-tree
Or river-fern came coloring the sky.
But still the cranes return.

Following the epigraph, these lines make the returning cranes feel less like consolation, a moment of transitory beauty glimpsed in the ongoing storm of the war, than like an emblem of the world's disregard for human suffering: the cranes return, the war continues unabated.

Stevens was ultimately dissatisfied with these lines, which he rejected in the final version of "Lettres d'un Soldat":

In a theatre, full of tragedy,
The stage becomes an atmosphere
Of seeping rose—banal machine
In an appointed repertoire ...

Here, the leap between the epigraph and the poem has become immense; no mention of the cranes or the soldier. The point of the poem is much the same as the earlier draft (that there is a danger in assuming that the world exists to respond to our suffering, as if nature had an "appointed repertoire" of conciliatory theatrical gestures), but Stevens elaborates the thought provoked by the poem's occasion rather than recording the occasion itself.

This is how Stevens's poems most often work. Even the more referential eleventh section of "Lettres d'un Soldat" hardly seems like a war poem when it appears as "The Death of the Soldier" among the other poems of Harmonium. But once we become aware of the urgency of its occasion—its stern rejection of an animated natural world—other more austerely philosophical poems in the collection may begin to seem more urgent as well.

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow.

It would be misleading, possibly aggrandizing, to suggest that these well-known lines from "The Snow Man" represents Stevens's thoughts about nature's indifference to wartime suffering; but our experience of "The Snow Man" is altered by our knowledge of poems in which Stevens just slightly more openly recorded the wartime occasion provoking his cry.

Fascinated as I am by the way in which a full knowledge of Stevens's career asks us to recontextualize his most famous poems, I'm also troubled by it. Does our knowledge of a notoriously effete poet's fascination with the World War make "The Snow Man" a better poem? A worse poem? Why would any poet ever choose to disguise a poem's socially momentous occasion? But why could it indeed be aggrandizing—self-congratulatory—to insist on the social relevance of Stevens's poems by virtue of their similarity to other more openly referential poems?

Stevens's poems do not simply provoke such questions; they were themselves provoked by such questions, and their diction—the highly deflected relationship of their language to what Stevens called "the pressure of the contemporaneous"— represents a complex response to such questions. The poet who seems to write in happy oblivion, removed from that pressure, courts one danger: the danger of seeming aloof, as if communal suffering were for other people. But the poet who covets that pressure—who craves the glamour of catastrophe—courts another danger: the danger of narcissism, of assuming one can speak for a community that has suffered as one has not.

Much of the poetry written and consumed in the immediate aftermath of both the First World War and September 11 succumbs to this danger because it neglects to acknowledge its smallness, so eager is such poetry to respond to unencompassable events. Worse, such a poet may seem happy with himself, the way Othello seems happy to be distraught over his wife's infidelity.

He was at Naples writing letters home
And, between his letters, reading paragraphs
On the sublime. Vesuvius had groaned
For a month. It was pleasant to be sitting there,
While the sultriest fulgurations, flickering,
Cast corners in the glass. He could desclibe
The terror of the sound because the sound
Was ancient. He tried to remember the phrases: pain
Audible at noon, pain torturing itself,
Pain killing pain on the very point of pain.
The volcano trembled in another ether,
As the body trembles at the end of life.

It was almost time for lunch. Pain is human.
There were roses in the cool cafe. His book
Made sure of the most correct catastrophe.

These opening lines of Stevens's "Esthetique du Mal," written during the Second World War, present a cautionary portrait of the sort of poet I've just described—the poet who has learned too readily to encompass catastrophe. Typically, Stevens does not write openly of the war to which he is responding; he distances himself from the poem's occasion, using the erupting Vesuvius as a figure for catastrophe. And in this sense, the poem's language provides the antidote to the problem the poem describes. To exercise poetic restraint in the face of catastrophe, to refuse the glamour of its occasion, is not to insulate oneself from self-congratulation (no work of art is completely immune to that) but to pause before the arrogance of understanding, the contentedness of having met the challenge of what should not be met. The diction of Stevens's poem is like the natural world in poems like "The Death of the Soldier" or "The Snow Man": whatever is happening, the diction goes, nevertheless, in its direction. There is not only, as I have suggested so far, a sternness in nature's refusal to acknowledge human suffering; there is also immense consolation—the assurance that the natural world will prevail in spite of the human potential for destruction. The language of Stevens's poetry partakes, in small ways, of this consolation.

To say so is not to take a stand against poems containing open references to war or shop windows. MacNeice was correct when he maintained that Yeats's "Lake Isle of Innisfree" would have been different, neither better nor worse, if it bore the signs of its occasion. Stevens's poems do not ask us to take sides, preferring one kind of poem or another, though influential readers of them have tried to persuade us that they do; more responsibly, his poems alert us to the fact that every poem assumes a position in relationship to its occasion—that no poem stands apart in happy oblivion, even if its language may seem not to acknowledge that occasion. Sometimes even sophisticated readers mistake reference for relevance, assuming that a poem referring openly to public events is automatically responsible to those events. Such a poem may be responsible or it may not; so mayor may not a poem that eschews such reference.

"Do you intend your poetry to be useful to yourself or others?" Stevens was asked in 1934. "Not consciously," he responded. "Perhaps I don't like the word useful." "What do you think the responsibilities of writers in general are when and if war comes?" Stevens was asked in 1939. "A war is a military state of affairs," Stevens responded, "not a literary one." Taken at face value, out of context, these stringent remarks might seem to suggest that Stevens believed that poetry had no essential relationship to public events. In fact, these remarks are evidence of Stevens's relentless consideration of that relationship, a relationship that by its very nature must be troubled, tenuous, delicate, inconsistent, registered in language that is itself by nature troubled and tenuous. To assert that war is not a literary affair is like asserting that seasonal change is not a literary affair: poems might in various ways address such events, but to believe we have fulfilled our social responsibilities by writing poems is a sentimentality Stevens could not countenance.

About the Author
James Longenbach is the author, most recently, of Draft of a Letter, his third collection of poems, and The Art of the Poetic Line, essays on craft. He is Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester.

The Antioch Review
Antioch University

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